THE Punjab Irrigated Agriculture Investment Programme Project-1 on the Lower Bari Doab command area on River Ravi will be completed on June 30.

“At least 275,000 rural households deriving their livelihood from crops grown in the Lower Bari Doab command area (LBDC) command area will be beneficiaries of the remodeling, up-gradation and rehabilitation of the barrage, the LBDC canal and its distributaries,” says a senior consultant of Punjab’s irrigation department overseeing execution of the Punjab Irrigated Agriculture Investment Programme (PIAIP).

“As 201km of main canal and 2,264km of distribution channels will be widened and rehabilitated along with upgrading the barrage, the initiative will result in an 18pc increase in water availability boosting the agricultural produce by 15pc in Okara, Pakpattan, Sahiwal and Khanewal districts.”

The Punjab irrigation network is 100-150 years old. Its designed annual cropping intensity was kept low at 60-80pc with canals diversion capacity aimed at spreading the water thinly over a large area equitably with minimum maintenance and repair costs to meet the needs of a small population at that time. The population growth over time pushed the cropping intensity up to 130-150pc overstressing the irrigation infrastructure.

For a major overhaul and improved capacity to meet the present day requirements, the government secured more than $233m loan facility from the Asian Development Bank in 2007, as first tranche of the PIAIP project.

The project will improve the Balloki Barrage and the LBDC system that supply irrigation water to more than 700,000ha of the aforementioned districts.

“The Balloki Barrage was suffering from insufficient flood capacity, sediment management problems, causing masking upstream of the barrage, and a deteriorating condition of its civil and mechanical appurtenants,” says an official of the Strategic Planning and Reform Unit (SPRU).

The project will improve the Balloki Barrage and the LBDC system that supply irrigation water to more than 700,000ha of the aforementioned districts

The Lower Bari Doab Canal was also experiencing a number of functional and safety issues like an inadequate capacity to carry authorised discharge of 9,841 cusecs; age-old and weakened structures and banks that have eroded over the past 100 years. The distribution system was also facing operational problems.

Officials also revealed that the flood discharge capacity of the barrage has been enhanced from 225,000 cusecs to 260,000 cusecs. Besides a new flood spillway has been constructed with a 120,000 cusecs capacity, increasing the barrage’s capacity to 100-year record flood of 380,000 cusecs.

He says the LBDC canal operated at 8,500 cusecs at head against its designed discharge of 9,841 cusecs. After remodelling, the canal has so far been safely operated at 9,300 cusecs while in the kharif season it will be operated at its original capacity of 9,841 cusecs.

The Montgomery-Pakpattan (MP) Link off-taking from LBDC has also been remodelled and up-graded and now it can operate with 1,000 cusecs instead of the earlier designed capacity of 300 cusecs. The up-graded capacity was safely tested up to 700 cusecs during the previous kharif season.

Similarly, Gugera Branch and Gugera distributary with a total length of 308 RDs has been rehabilitated and operating at the authorised discharge of 850 cusecs. A new BS Link Head regulator with a capacity of 10,000 cusecs has been constructed to help transfer more water to Suleimanki Barrage for Bahawalpur Zone after remodeling of BS Link.

“The canals’ capacity was improved by removing the old concrete structures like bridges and falls to widen its narrow openings,” explains an official involved with the designing of the project.

He said that the concrete lining of distributaries with up to 50 cusecs capacity (tail portions of the water channels) has been done to improve water flow and lower maintenance costs as well as reduced efforts to de-silt the channels. The slope of the lining disallows buffaloes to sit in the channels and obstruct the water flow.

The bricked mogas (water outlets) have been replaced with concrete ones for better water flow and to check water theft, he adds.

Zahoor Ahmed, a progressive wheat and cotton grower from Sahiwal, is one of the beneficiaries of the improved water flows in Gugera distributary. According to him, the distributary was earlier run on a perennial basis i.e. wter was supplied every alternate week. But, now there is no interruption in water supply for irrigation purposes.

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, July 3rd, 2017