Sometime in 2006, the princess of Hunza made an appeal that the proceeds to the Bhasha dam should go to Hunza. In February that same year I wrote an open letter to the princess which did not get published. I pointed out in the letter that
Indeed the dam, if built will not only cost some thousands of families to lose homes and lands but it will also be a constant threat to the lives of several thousand on a day to day basis.
A decade earlier I had visited the site of the proposed dam on an extraordinary visit to one of my favorite places on the globe and one that I have visited fairly regularly in the last thirty-five years. I had then come to the conclusion that:
I am afraid that I must urge you to reconsider your support of the project which may bring a short term boost to Diamar but is sure to bring disaster in its wake, not only to Diamar but also to Bhasha and Bisham Qila and hundreds of miles downstream.
An earlier experience more than a century ago created a lake half the size of the Atabad phenomenon. This too I had mentioned in the open letter
in the nineteenth century [a landslide caused a 685ft. dam] … enclosed 3.7MAF of water. Now the proposed dam near Bhasha has a height of 660ft. and a gross storage of nearly twice as much i.e. 7.3 MAF which will inundate several miles of the KKH as well as the district headquarters at Chilas. If reduced to 645ft., the dam will cause a lake to be formed which will stand just below the town of Chilas. Even if we can disregard the seismic risk altogether, the risk of flooding Chilas will still remain an annual possibility between June and August when the flow rises from 1,000 to 5,500 at Partab bridge, almost a hundred miles upstream of the proposed dam site and nearly twice as much at Barzin.
Is it not possible for us to utilize the natural disaster at Atabad to our advantage? Nature has enclosed for us a body of water with a length of 13 miles and a depth of 330 ft. at a cost of life and property of the people of the region without any expense by the state to start with. However, in order to manage the flow of water, a spillway was made. In size, the lake is perhaps a 20th portion of what the Diamar-Bhasha Lake is expected to become. We have seen the destruction caused by the landslide at Atabad but we have not exploited the potential of the lake that has been created nor considered the destruction that a similar calamity may cause if it hits the river after the dam has been built at Diamar-Bhasha.
This is a high risk area for water storage; it is unlikely to be useful for irrigation purposes, but its potential for electricity generation can be utilized as a run-of-the-river project. In the preceding discussion on “The Integrated Management of National Resources”, areas which support pastoral life better than agriculture have been mentioned. Diamar-Bhasha is just such a region; it is also ideal for generating electricity without storage of water for irrigation, which is of little use in the rocky defiles and torrid rivulets of the flood season.
However with only a little management the area can supply large quantities of electricity. On the other hand, a little further downstream, the same water may be stored anywhere in the vicinity of Abbottabad or below in dams of manageable size for local irrigation all the way down to Sind, with canal diversions or dry-bed diversions that facilitate floodplain or managed irrigation as well as flood and silt control all along the riverine region using the techniques with which the locals are familiar for district/tehsil water management.
A comprehensive plan for riverine communities of Pakistan can be formulated within the framework suggested below. The program should undertake formulation and execution of strategies on the following list within the context of floods and draughts in Pakistan.
- Village damage control
- Breach strategy and flood plain
- Overflow drains and flood management
- Overflow drains and desert/arid locations
- Drainage in torrential regions
- Reviving the ancient Gabar band style of water storage
- Arid drains and draught supply
- Normal flow and crop optimization
Breach Strategies should be the portal for the program. This activity can be the follow up of the flood report 10-11 and could be of interest to the same donors. The program should
provide an opportunity of social organization and lead to the formation of strategies for village damage control in village communities which display initiative. Villages would be encouraged to identify secured locations of high ground to which the community would retreat if floods are likely and formulate drills for moving people, livestock and movable property in the first instance on self-help basis. Such villages should formulate survival strategies for the duration of a flood and evacuation strategies for relief activities after.
Similar strategies should be developed for salvation of crops and other immovable property before and after the flood; the kind of activity employed by reed hut owners in historic times whose houses were susceptible to fire. Plans should also be formulated for rehabilitation on self-help basis with an interface with government and civil society. The political aspect of the strategy could emerge in the form of electoral fallout from the local government to the central government level and the parties in power at the time.
At the local government level SOPs could be developed to facilitate drainage by securing overflow first as alluvium, then as water supply in flood plains and finally as ‘opportunity resource’ for water-scarce regions such as Cholistan and tail regions of canal irrigation. It should then be possible to exploit the potential of ‘detour’ management of floods. Thus it would reduce pressure on the banks and minimize overflow due to flooding by staggering the flow of water in the river. Since breaches are generally made to save waterways and dams or flood overflow towards an urban area, it should be possible to avoid a breach if discharge at vital points can be kept below the level of overflow. This may be achieved by the use of a loop of a certain quantity of discharge so that it can arrive at the vital point when a higher discharge has passed before it or is to come after it. Such a natural loop may be found in the form of the dry beds of Sutlej and Beas in Cholistan.
This detour procedure should facilitate ‘opportunity irrigation’ of desertified regions in the vicinity of the rivers. The storage procedure of the gabar band and village ponds may be added to such drains as in the case of rivers which do not reach the sea [as is the case of the dry beds mentioned above]. Simultaneously, this should lead to drainage strategies for the torrential regions. From this base, crop optimization during draughts and in times of normal flow may be developed through the execution of appropriate projects.