China to fund Pak hydel power, dam projects: FM

[LahoreEstate]

MULTAN: Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said on Sunday that China had promised to extend financial assistance to Pakistan to execute dams and hydel power projects in the country.

Addressing a dinner ceremony hosted in his honour at the Loother Union Council late on Sunday night, he said over 10,000 experts, engineers and workers from China were involved in work on 120 development projects in Pakistan.

He said he, along with President Asif Ali Zardari, visited China three times and were preparing for a fourth visit in the near future.Qureshi said an agreement had been reached for gas supply from Iran. This gas would be utilised to produce thermal power to overcome the shortfall of electricity, he added.

He said that after disagreements among the provinces over the Kalabagh Dam, the federal government reached a consensus among the federating units on the Bhasha Dam and approved the project.

To save it from being submerged into the lake, he said, the highway would be realigned, so that it remained above the lake’s water level and continued to facilitate traffic operations. He said the Bhasha Dam project would also prolong the Tarbela Dam’s age, as it would reduce the accumulation of silt in the Tarbela lake.

He said the government would also build 32 small dams in all the four provinces. Qureshi admitted that the problem of loadshedding was hurting industrial and agriculture sectors, besides causing inconvenience to the people. He, however, added that most of the power generation and dam projects were planned by the PPP government.

He said it was the government of late Benazir Bhutto, which introduced the scheme of independent power producers (IPPs) and invited foreign investors to set up thermal power stations in the country. He added that one could easily recall that the production of electricity was in surplus in 1996 and the government was negotiating with India to export surplus power to earn foreign exchange.

But none of the governments, including the Musharraf regime, paid attention to enhance power-generating capacity of the country, he said. Our domestic requirements continued to swell, but not a single megawatt of power was added to the national grid and at the moment, the country was facing a shortfall of 4,000 to 5,000 megawatts of electricity, he added.

Giving details of the steps taken by the PPP government, he said it arranged rental power-generating units and removed hurdles in the way of the projects, which were stopped due to certain reasons.

Most of these projects would be completed and start power production by December this year, he added. He said the government would purchase electricity from rental power projects, to be run by the private sector, and would add it to the national grid.


http://www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=23650