Chief justice launches fundraising campaign for dams

The Chief Justice of Pakistan, Saqib Nisar, is on an unlikely mission to build two multi-billion dollar dams to help alleviate the country’s water shortage.

On July 4 he ordered the government to immediately start the construction of the longplanned dams, and then donated Rs10mn ($8,200) from his own pocket to launch a public fundraising campaign.

According to the figures updated yesterday on the Supreme Court’s website, around Rs110mn have been raised so far.

One of the dams, called Diamer-Basha, is in its preliminary stage and is being built on the Indus river in northern Pakistan, some 300km west of K2 – the second highest mountain in the world.

The dam, if completed, is touted to become the highest roller-compacted concrete dam in the world.

The second one is Mohmand dam, set to be constructed on the Swat river, some 40km north of Peshawar.

The UN Development Programme says that Pakistan could run dry by 2025 unless action is taken.

Despite the pressing need for a solution, Nisar’s donation drive has come under criticism from experts and the public alike.

According to Khurram Hussain, a business editor at Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper, the estimated cost for the construction is Rs1.450tn (around $12bn).

Calling the fundraising drive “embarassing”, he wrote in his weekly opinion column: “If we assume that on average, the account sees an inflow of Rs20mn per day (which is highly optimistic), then it will take 72,500 days to reach the target, or 199 years”.

Following the chief justice’s lead, the Pakistan army said in a statement on Twitter that two days’ salary of military officers and one day’s salary of the soldiers would be donated to the fund.

Nisar has also asked the government to generate funds for the construction of future dams through water pricing.

“Water pricing mechanism should be improved to get revenue for construction of dams,” Nisar said, according to minutes of a recent meeting, to the ministries of planning, water resources, energy, law and justice, climate change and the cabinet division, besides professional and technical agencies and provincial governments.

Presiding over the meeting of the Law and Justice Commission of Pakistan (LJCP), attended by senior representatives of the ministries, Indus River System Authority, National Engineering Services Pakistan, Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda), Indus Water Commission, and private experts, the chief justice said that the issue of water scarcity had reached an alarming level.

Nisar said that the resolution of the water issue is “responsibility of the executives, and failure to discharge this responsibility has resulted in taking up of this issue by the superior judiciary as breach of fundamental right i.e. right to life”.

The Planning Commission told the meeting that the national water policy approved by the Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz government had identified 30-40 areas for urgent works that would take four to five years to achieve.

Nisar asserted that the judiciary would find a solution to the water shortage in the country.

He said it is crucial because he had been told by experts during the course of hearing a related case that Pakistan could not survive in this situation of water scarcity and that all research reports showed that Pakistan could run out of water by 2024.