THE Neelum-Jhelum hydroelectric project was at long last launched on Feb 9 at a cost of $2.16 billion with the help of the Chinese. It will go a long way in the country's socio-economic development. It would have a 47km-long tunnel and generate 947 MW of cheap hydel power. The project is expected to be completed in eight years.

So far so good. But the intriguing question still remains why has this project been delayed for five years? The country has lost a whopping amount of more than Rs40 billion due to this delay. Just imagine how quietly this loss has been digested as if nothing serious has happened.

Can the people responsible clarify why this delay has occurred? What sort of planning was it? Which agency was supposed to oversee the launching process of the project and remove the bottlenecks as and when they occurred? Why wasn't it done and have any heads rolled due to this criminal negligence of these officials? If not, why?

Had everything been followed in a professional manner without keeping self-interest in view, the project would have been completed by 2010.

The nation is facing the brunt of somebody else's ineptitude and is hostage to the unnecessary long spells of loadshedding, as approximately 947MW of electricity would have been produced due to the completion of this project in 2010.

It is unfortunate that this shortage of electricity is despite the fact that we are sitting on one of the largest reservoirs of coal in the world.

The coal reservoirs in China were meeting 70 per cent of that country's energy requirements whereas in Pakistan, only one per cent of electricity was being generated through this resource.

The technology is available with China. Due to its good track record, China could be tasked to generate electricity from coal at competitive rates. If we utilise only this one resource gainfully, we can face as many industrial booms as we can, establish as many industries as we want, besides meeting the entire energy requirements of the country for more than a century (to say the least) as our total coal reserves are estimated to be 184.5 billion tonnes.

AIR CDRE (r) AZFAR

A. KHAN

Rawalpindi