As Pakistan faces worsening water scarcity – and trouble sourcing international cash for hydropower dams it says it needs – it has turned to an unlikely source of cash: A fundraising campaign backed by the country’s top court judges.
Last year Mian Saqib Nisar – then the country’s chief supreme court judge – donated a million Pakistani rupees ($7,400) of his own money to start the drive, calling water shortages a major national threat.
The drive aims to raise as much as a staggering $14 billion toward the cost of installing water reservoirs and other equipment for two major dams.
Nisar retired in January from the court, but the current panel of top judges have taken over the push. Some politicians from government opposition parties have dismissed the effort, calling it inappropriate and doomed to fail. “Building dams is not the responsibility of the court,” said Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, chairman of party Pakistan Peoples Party. But efforts to solicit donations from as far away as the United States and Britain, largely from expatriate Pakistanis, have raised $70 million as of mid-February toward the “Chief Justice Dam Fund”, according to the Supreme Court of Pakistan’s website. The country’s green-leaning Prime Minister Imran Khan backs the effort. “Water (scarcity) has been Pakistan´s number one issue and the country may face shortages by 2025 if dams are not built,” Khan warned in a state television address last September.
He has urged Pakistanis living overseas to donate generously to the effort, comparing the battle to combat water scarcity to a holy war. “Pakistanis, do take part in this jihad,” the prime minister urged.
Water Worries
Nisar has said he took up Pakistan’s water worries as a personal campaign after Syed Mehar Ali, commissioner of the country’s Indus water treaty, testified in a court hearing last July about worsening water scarcity risks in the country.
Ali told the court that the country’s three western rivers – the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab – carry nearly 140 million acre feet (MAF) of water but the country has water storage capacity for less than 14 MAF. Much of the water flowing down the river ends up in irrigation channels, but at least 29 MAF simply flows to sea, he said. Pakistan needs to store 25 MAF of water each year to help shore up water security, the commissioner said – and that would require a series of new large dams, he said. But building them has proved difficult. An effort to construct a large-scale hydropower dam in Gilgit Baltistan, a Kashmir border region disputed with India, for instance, has had trouble attracting multinational funding. The proposed Diamer Basha also has proved controversial within the country, facing opposition from some environmental and farmer groups.
Published in Daily Times, February 25th 2019.
