WAPDA AN INEFFICIENT AND WASTEFUL BEHEMOTH
The initiator and executor of kalabagh Dam project is WAPDA, the Water and Power Development Authority.
Created under an Act of Parliament, Pakistan Water and Power Development Authority ACT 1958 (Pakistan Act No.XXXI of 1958) and modelled after the Tennessee Valley Authority (T.V.A) WAPDA is a behemoth employing more than 160,000 people and has an annual budget running into billions.
Since 1958, the year of its creation, WAPDA has been entrusted with all the water and power development projects in Pakistan. As enunciated in Chapter III of the Act, the powers and Duties of the Authority, Are:
i. Irrigation, water supply and drainage; and recreational use of water resources;
ii. The generation, transmission and distribution of power; and the maintenance and operation of power houses and grids;
iii. Flood control
iv. The prevention of water logging and reclamation of water logged and salted lands.
v. Inland navigation; and
vi. The prevention of any ill-effects on public health resulting from the operation of the authority. Unfortunately the working of WAPDA towards the management of water resources and electric power generation leaves much to be desired. The glaze of mega projects like Tarbela Dam and Ghazi Barotha hydel projects and the self congratulatory media hype has kept hidden from public knowledge the serious drawbacks of planning and execution, the cost over runs, the extremely adverse cost benefit ratio and the much reduced life expectancy of WAPDA’s projects.
The project documents of kalabagh Dam are a glaring example of WAPDA’s inability of learning from its mistakes. Despite ver’ serious problems experienced in Tarbela and Mangla Dams, the documents of KBD again fail to address important technical, social, economic and environmental issues. What will happen 10 or 20 years after kalabagh Dam is constructed when Attock valley gorge starts filling with the heavy sedimentation carried by Rivers Indus, Soan and Kabul like Tarbela now? Will flash floods then overflow the banks of kalabagh Dam Reservoir and inundate Mardan and Swabi vales.
The proposed kalabagh Dam site is situated in an area known to have fault lines and fractures. The LANDSAT and SPOT satellite imagery of the kalabagh Dam site indicates a right lateral fault known as kalabagh Fault and another known as Kharjawan Fault cutting the kalabagh Dam site NESW between Indus and kharjawan Nala on the right bank.
So far very little is known about movement of earth plates and the causes and intensity of earthquakes that the movement and collision of earth plates cause. Still lesser is known about the effects, billion tons of stored water will have on a suspect foundation.
The general public in Pakistan is not properly informed that the tectonic plates known as IndoPak plate and the Asian Plate (Tibetan Plateau) are both greatly compressed and tectonically active. Fewer still know that the compression and collision of moving earth plates cause mountains to rise and that Himalayan and karakoram Mountains continue to rise by a few millimetres each year due to the same compression. Such a phenomenon is bound to create instability in the area to a substantial degree. The people of Pakistan must be informed that large dams induce earthquakes as the world has found out through experience, and that there are serious chances of a mishap to the dam structure because of the not yet fully understood effects of the tectonic activity and the dam induced earthquakes.
WAPDA’s defective planning and execution of projects and its glossing over of its serious mistakes when the projects are commissioned, can be gauged from the history of the Tarbela Dam.
Commissioned in 1974, delayed by 3 years and finally costing the nation $ one billion which was 25% of our total national debt at the time, the Tarbela project was heralded as a revolution in water resources development in Pakistan.
But from the very beginning Tarbela dam had design and engineering problems so glaring that WAPDA could easily be accused of culpable negligence and gross inefficiency.
All rivers carry varying degrees of silt and sedimentation. If not taken care of, dams on most rivers will turn into silt tanks in a very short time.
Sanmenxia dam on Yellow River, in Cahina, was completed in 1960 and decommissioned four years later in 1964 because of much more than estimated deposition of silt. After remodelling of the dam at great cost, Sanmenxia dam has been re-commissioned again.
The Nizam Sagar dam in India was estimated to silt by about 570 acre feet per year but started silting up 16 times more at about 8,700 acre feet per year.
River Indus carries a very heavy load of sedimentation, conservatively estimated at 250 million tons per year, out of the total sedimentation load of about 400 million tons carried by the Indus River System annually. This is known to every single official of irrigation department in any of the provinces, and perhaps every one with common sense.
The defective planning of WAPDA can be gauged from the fact that the original planning documents of Tarbela dam did not include adequate provision of removing the silt deposition, so that only 30 years after commissioning of the dam a huge mountain of silt, 150 feet high, has risen behind the dam, threatening its structure and reducing the reservoir capacity by about 0.3 MAF each year.
The American engineers have been able to control the degree of silt formation in the reservoir of Hoover dam, which was commissioned in 1932, increasing the life of the dam to about a 1000 years. So have the Chinese, with their Sanmexia dam. WAPDA, not having learnt anything from the experience of other nations in the period of Tarbela planning, have only recently started thinking seriously about de-silting Tarbela. Strangely, however, the same company, TAMS, has been awarded the fresh contract of finding the solution which it failed, so glaringly, to propose in the first place.
Another failure of WAPDA was the improper location by the dam site. The structure and formation, of the Tarbela dam site was either not investigated properly or its shortcomings glossed over so that, very soon, the 500 feet (150 meter) deep reservoir water, under tremendous pressure, dissolved the conglomerated rock underneath to create vertical sink holes. Left unattended these sink holes could lead to underground cavities and springs and could easily engulf the dam structure. Literally washing it away lock, stock and barrel.
Four hundred and forty sink holes developed in Tarbela reservoir and around the dam structure in 1975, the year of the dam’s commissioning.
A panic stricken WAPDA resorted to filling the sink holes with special type of clay on an emergency basis. However the dissolution of an unstable lower stratum is a weathering process that continued to increase and so did the number of sink holes each passing year. In 85-86, 507 sink holes were filled with clay by a fleet of bottom dump barges that were now permanently stationed in the reservoir. (WAPDA Report 1985-86).
The chronic structural, geo-tectonic, seismic and other problems of Tarbela has made the dam one of the most monitored dams in the world, requiring a wide range of sophisticated and expensive electronic equipment. It cost WAPDA Rs 714 million to maintain only the water component of arbela Dam each year!
The latest position is that Tarbela dam cannot be operated at the optimum design storage and power generation simultaneously. If optimum power generation is kept in view then water releases for irrigation is considerably reduced and if irrigation water is given priority, power generation equipment gets damaged. The Ministry of Water and Power has hirected WAPDA not to operate Tarbela Dam below 1350 feet ASL (above sea level) water level at the lake. The dead storage level of Tarbela being 1300 feet ASL, it means that 50 feet of water in Tarbela will not be used for irrigation purpose because when operated at lower level, huge quantities of silt washes down the tunnel into power turbines, not only damaging the turbine blades and eroding the tunne! Walls but also allowing the sedimentation mountain to creep nearer the dam structure threatening the very dam itself. Already tunnel#3 and 4 have 6 feet of sedimentation settled at the necks and now foreign consultants are being engaged to find the solution to yet another problem. (DAWN, June 20th, 1997).
WAPDA’s engineering capabilities are extremely limited and even its operational capabilities are questionable.
When one of the Sukkur Barrage (built 1932) gates collapsed, in December 1982, WAPDA was unable to repair the gate and 56 gates were ordered to be replaced by a British firm at a cost of $ 30 million.
In June 1993 Mangla Dam was allowed to be filled to the brim despite the fact that torrential rains in the catchment area forewarned of massive water inflows. The simple operation of maintaining a balance between incoming and released water in the reservoir was beyong WAPDA, so that the critical stage was reached suddenly and all the gates of the reservoir had to be opened to save the dam structure. The result was a horrendous loss of hundreds of lives and livestock and property worth billion. The intersting point is that not a single head rolled. Nobody was held responsible.
The inefficiency of the corruption ridden WAPDA can further be gauged from the simple peration of its power wing. The cost of electric power generation by WAPDA has become so exorbitant that industrial consumers have to pay more than Rs 4 per kilo watt hour (10 US cents). It has now become cheaper for industries to operate their own power generating units than to seek the bulk producer’s help.
One look at a customer’s electric bill will immediately show why there is so much antipathy for WAPDA all over the country especially among those affiliated with the industry.
It is a matter of common sense that a bulk producer will (and shuld) appreciate a bulk consumer, since the bulk consumer pays a concentrated amount for the service obtained. Therefore a bulk consumer isfavoured by concession in prices. All over the world this sensible approach holds. Only in Pakistan, under an inefficient organization like WAPDA, the more a person uses electic power, the more he has to pay on an escalating scale. It is as if a vendor cries out not to buy what he is selling!! There are “fuel adjustment charges”, “surcharges” and “additional surcharges” that add 75% to a cost of 25%.
According to a report WAPDA suffers generation losses to the to the tune of 23.5% on annual average and another 20% on billed revenue annually 1% of generating losses amount to Rs 1.2 billion per year and the 20% of billed revenue comes to about Rs. 2 billion (The Daily “DAWN” 17th may,1997). This makes a total loss of a whopping Rs 30 billion annually!! On more efficient systems the generation and line losses are less than 10%.
The people of Pakistan are unhappy with WAPDA and rightly suspicious of all plans and projects advanced by the Authority. Too many questions beg an answer. Too many clouded issues need clearance.
Why was re-designing and de-silting of Tarbela dam not actively considered before the problem of the dam turning into a silt tank, or the damage to the dam structure, became a matter only …ears away? Why was a storage dam upstream of Tarbele not considered seriously and accorded priority, since even a layman can understand that any dam sp stream will not only increase the life of Tarbela by trapping the silt in Indus, but will also increase it power generation capability? Is it because the proponents of kalabagh so badly wanted this particular dam (since water could be siphoned off only from here and not from any dam upstream) that they would go to any length to make kalabagh dam seem unavoidable?
While Pakistan is fortunate to have about 123 MAF water most of the years and 86 million acres cultivable area, 50 million acres of this cultivable land has no water available. Of the 34.5 million canal commanded area, that does get irrigation water, more than 30% is threatened by water logging due to excess watering. This indicates serious mismanagement of water resources. Why has the Authority shown interest only in development of water resources (meaning construction of large dams) rather than properly managing water resources?
On the Electric Power Generation front also WAPDA has proved extremely inefficient. While there is potential of 30,000 MW cheap hydrel power available in the country, Pakistan is so short of the energy that till the costly power plants were hurriedly inducted into operation in the private sector, there was constant load shedding in the country causing billions of rupees in lost industrial activity.
With all above questions unanswered and many more besides; with WAPDA’s track record of ill planning and defective execution; with the tales of its corruption and inefficiency; and with its known bias for one province against the interests of others, it will be a miracle if people of Sindh will trust WAPDA with a $10 billion project like kalabagh dam which has all the hallmarks of an ill planned disaster for Sindh and none of the advantages being bandies about and for which the province of Sindh, along with the whole nation, will have to pay for ages.
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