Milk the public
PERHAPS the inspiration came from milking the buffalo his father-in-law gave him. Or the hardships he endured during his training for the Olympics 2024, in which he won the gold medal for his record-breaking javelin throw. It is said that recently, when invited to be a motivational speaker at a school in Lahore, someone on his behalf demanded a fee of Rs50 lakhs.
Instant celebrities have just cause. In the 1960s, the British model Mandy-Rice Davies charged an exorbitant fee from a Sunday rag for her revelations about the Profumo scandal. Her justification? She needed to provide for her “predictably insecure future”.
Was that the rationale for the startling increase approved last year in the perquisites for Senate chairmen, past, present and future? Their benefits extend over nine pages and into the lifetime of the beneficiaries. Clearly, John F. Kennedy’s advice is lost on our legislators: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”
Milking our country is now a given. A former president is supposed to have told an incoming State Bank governor: “I am the president; therefore, understand that the State Bank is my bank.”
The fund provided no mechanism for refunds to subscribers.
A shameful example of this ‘your hand in the public pocket’ attitude has been the Diamer-Bhasha dam project, located on the River Indus between Kohistan and the Diamer district in Gilgit-Baltistan.
In 1998, prime minister Nawaz Sharif inaugurated the Diamer-Bhasha project, designed to generate 4,500 megawatts of electricity. It should have been completed in nine years. Ten years later, in 2018, unfinished, its cost has ballooned from an original Rs479 billion to Rs1,400bn.
Wapda (hitherto responsible for the construction of dams) warned that at least $12bn would be required to build Diamer-Bhasha dam — $7bn for power generation and another $5bn for infrastructure. The hilly terrain precludes any arterial irrigation canals.
In July 2018, the then chief justice ordered a national fund to be established to finance its construction. Two days later, the then prime minister added his PMO’s name to the CJ’s project. Commercial banks and cellular companies became the conduits to receive contributions from a gullible public.
Within six months, the dam fund rapidly accumulated $66.7 million. After July 2019, deposits dwindled to a trickle. The public was assured that the fund’s status would be “regularly updated” before the Supreme Court of Pakistan. As if the backlog of 43,800 cases was not burden enough, the Supreme Court constituted an implementation bench of five apex court judges. It did not examine the progress reports. All five judges of the bench have since retired and never been replaced.
Meanwhile, Wapda disbursed Rs115.9bn for land acquisition, and Pakistan signed a Rs442bn contract with China Power and FWO to execute the project. The billions spent on direct and indirect advertising has never been disclosed.
In October 2024, 26 years after its inauguration, the Supreme Court finally examined the fund’s status. It was told that the fund had received Rs23.7bn, of which the amount collected was Rs11.5bn. The mark-up earned on it paid to the apex court by the federal government was Rs.12.2bn. The court noted that the fund’s account constituted only 3.2 per cent of the money required to complete the dam.
Today, Wapda predicts the dam will involve a financial outlay of Rs1,406.5bn. It anticipates a completion date of February 2029. The Supreme Court has ordered the fund’s assets to be transferred to the public exchequer and buried the moribund fund.
Are the court and the Prime Minister’s Office liable for misrepresentation, because the public’s contributions have not been applied towards their original purpose? The fund provided no mechanism for refunds to subscribers. Their money has disappeared in the federal government’s bottomless well.
That the Chinese are now co-partners in the project’s implementation is reassuring. They know something about dams. After the gigantic Three Gorges Dam, China is planning a ‘mother of all dams’ — a 60,000 MW Motuo mega dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo River in Tibet. This river (known in India as the Brahmaputra) supplies water to an estimated 1.8bn people within China and in India, Bhutan, and Bangladesh.
Understandably, India has retaliated with a plan to build a 11,000 MW hydropower and reservoir project on the Siang River in Arunachal’s Upper Siang district. India fears that China’s mega dam will allow China, being in the upper riparian, to “curtail the river’s flow during the lean season and trigger artificial floods during the rainy season”.
Could China’s mega dam be our insurance against India’s arbitrary abrogation of the Indus Waters Treaty?
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, October 24th, 2024