ISLAMABAD: The Capital Development Authority (CDA) has decided to request the government to include the Ghazi Barotha water supply project in the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project.

Under the initiative worth Rs37 billion and announced by the CDA in 2006, the civic agency plans to bring in 200 million gallons daily (MGD) of water for the twin city from the Ghazi Barotha Dam on the Indus River.

“The cost of the project is likely to have increased to over Rs50 billion as we have to revise its PC-1,” a CDA official told Dawn.

He said that the decision of asking the government to include the project in CPEC was made in a meeting held at the CDA headquarters recently, which was chaired by the Minister of Capital Administration and Development Division (CADD) Dr Tariq Fazal Chaudhry.

According to the minutes of the meeting, the suggestion of including the project in CPEC was made by Islamabad Mayor and CDA chief Sheikh Ansar Aziz and that after they are worked out, the proposals are to be submitted through CADD.

CDA spokesperson Mazhar Hussein said the civic agency was working on the proposal for the project.

The project was delayed for several years as provinces were not ready to give water to Islamabad, Pindi from their share

The water supply project has faced a delay of many years as the provinces were not ready to give their share of water to Islamabad and Rawalpindi. However, during a meeting of the Council of Common Interest (CCI) last year, all the provinces agreed on the project after which the federal government gave the CDA the green light to initiate the project for bringing in water from the River Indus.

Under the agreed-on formula, the CDA is allowed to take 74 cusecs of water each from Sindh and Punjab, 27 cusecs from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and 24 cusecs from Balochistan. This project was planned to conduct 655 MGD of water per day by 2050 in three phases. In the first phase, 200 MGD of water will be supplied to the twin cities.

The federal capital, and especially the I and G sectors, face a shortage of water every summer as the city is supplied 70 MGD when it needs 211 MGD and this gap widens in the summers.

The CDA has so far not come up with viable alternate projects. The civic body had invested in the Chirah Dam project, which was approved in 2009 and is a joint venture of the CDA and the Punjab government, with the latter being the executing agency.

As per the PC-1 for the project, the construction of the dam, which was to have a capacity for 15 MGD, was to be completed by 2013 but so far, the concerned authorities have not even purchased land for this and the estimated cost of it has increased from Rs5.3 billion to Rs18 billion.

The Senate Standing Committee on Cabinet Secretariat recently directed the CDA to disassociate itself from this project and look for alternate initiatives.

When asked, CDA member planning Asad Mehboob Kayani, who also holds additional charge as member engineering which deals with water related projects, said the CDA chairman will meet the Federal Minister for Planning Ahsan Iqbal in the coming few days in order to seek his advice on making the project part of CPEC.

“Then we will submit our summary to the prime minister’s office for final approval,” he said.

Published in Dawn January 28th, 2017