Little progress seen in water project planned to end inter-provincial distrust.

ISLAMABAD -- In a tug of war among the water resources ministry, the regulator and the contractors, a multi-million dollar foreign-funded project planned to overcome inter-provincial distrust over water distribution and theft is lying in the doldrums.

As a result, a multilateral lending agency has concluded to cancel its financial assistance committed to the project as 'misprocurement'. The project was taken in hand on the orders of the prime minister following a unanimous decision of the Council of Common Interests to address all future complaints by the provinces about water theft and mismanagement.

The government had arranged a $35 million soft loan from the World Bank for additional financing of the Water Sector Capacity Building and Advisory Services Project. A major part of this credit was earmarked for hydraulic calibration of 17 key sites and automation of discharge monitoring of all sites - commonly called as telemetry system. Interestingly, a similar project completed at a cost of over Rs350 million in 2005 was scrapped owing to similar disputes and technical hitches.

A probe body, appointed by the water resources secretary under directives of the prime minister, has blamed the members of the Indus River System Authority (Irsa) for destroying a multi-million dollar telemetry project planned to overcome inter-provincial distrust over water shares and distributions.

The ministry of water resources has withdrawn the project from Irsa and transferred it for implementation to the Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda) that had previously got the same project installed that could not take off. For a change, the ministry has now directed Irsa that the project be executed by Wapda as 'deposit work' sponsored by Irsa and all its members should be involved in the supervision of the Wapda's deposit work (as contractor) and make payments to Wapda on satisfactory takeover. In the meanwhile develop technical team to take over the project on completion to avoid repeat of 2006-07 failures.

World Bank decides to cancel financial assistance

Irsa members have on the other hand blamed the senior most officers of the water resources ministry for conflict of interest in derailing the project through one-sided briefings to the prime minister and blaming one of them for jeopardising the project right at the time of its contract so that it could be given to second bidder the National Engineering Services Pakistan (Nespak). They denied to have any...