ISLAMABAD: Senate Standing Committee on Planning referred the inquiry report of Ministry of Planning regarding desalination plant in Gwadar to National Accountability Bureau (NAB) for further inquiry.
The report was prepared by the planning ministry on recommendation of the Senate committee.
The meeting which was presided over by Senator Agha Shahzaib Durrani here, was informed that the ministry had dispatched a team comprising of high officials to Gwadar to personally witness the current status of desalination plant and to inquired the concerned stakeholders responsible for building and maintaining the plant.
The report said the plant was totally shut down and not filtering a single drop of water.
According to the report, there was a fault in design of the plant that’s why it was closed down after running for a few days.
Senator Kauda Babar said billions of rupees were spent on the project but due to the negligence of authorities concerned, the plant could not got functional.
He said the local people had to spend thousands of rupees daily for purchasing water from tankers for their daily use.
Balochistan Development Authority chairman said the plant was installed in April 2016 and it remained functional for over a month and produced 700,000 gallons of water per day.
However, he said due to high ratio of silt in the intake water, the plant got dysfunctional.
Meanwhile, talking on another agenda, the committee recommended that the planning ministry should consider increase the number of small dams in Balochistan from current 100 dams to 500 dams.
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“Balochistan neither has canal system nor underground resources of water, therefore the number of small dams across the province must be increased,” Agha Shahzaib Durrani said.
The committee also recommended that the ministry should immediately release the required Rs1,200 million for building the remaining small dams of the 100 small dams project.
The meeting was informed that the 100 dam project in Balochistan consisted of five packages.
In the first package 20 dams had already been completed at a cost of Rs2.4 billion, while in the second package, 22 out of 26 dams had been completed at a cost of Rs4.4 billion whereas in the third package 20 more dams are scheduled to be completed by 2020 at a cost of Rs7.6 billion.
In the fourth and fifth packages, 23 and 11 dams would be built by 2026.
The meeting was further informed that total area of 66 dams of three packages was 2,154 million acres whereas total storage capacity of these dams was around 2467 million acre feet.
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