In response to the Capital Development Authority’s request of sharing the 50% cost of the Mega Ghazi Barotha Water Supply Project, the Water and Sanitation Agency (WASA) has recommended the Punjab government through Rawalpindi Development Authority (RDA) that the provincial government should pay 25% cost of the project as the city would receive only 25% of the water share, 50% of which would go to Islamabad and the remaining 25% to the cantonment area which is already funded by the federal government.
The Capital Development Authority (CDA) has a plan to extract 100 MGD water to the twin cities on daily basis to meet the ever-increasing shortage of water in the twin cities. The CDA, in this regard, prepared PCI to acquire land worth Rs 3.154 million. The CDA demanded Rs 1.577 million from the Punjab govt. to purchase land, as the cost and water of the project, CDA thought, will be shared equally by the federal and Punjab provincial governments for Rawalpindi.
Earlier the Advisor to Prime Minister on CDA affairs Ali Nawaz Awan, while speaking on a consultative meeting, had said that the Government had started work on extracting 100 million gallons per day from Ghazi Brotha, “The government is working on long and short term initiatives to meet water requirements of the federal capital. We have also worked on efficient water management as a short-term measure. A lot of progress has been made in this direction.,” The advisor to PM also told that the population of the capital city was only 0.8 million in 1998 that has tripled in 2021 and now the population has surged to 2.3 million.
See Also: LEH Expressway Project By RDA
In the same way, Rawalpindi has also got its population manifold and there is a dire need for some megaproject to mitigate the woes of the masses. Meanwhile, the Wasa executives told Dawn that the city is facing an acute shortage of water and currently water supply to the Wasa service area is 51 MGD from all sources of Rawal Dam (10 million gallons), Kanpur Dam (6 million gallons), and 480 pipe wells (35 million gallons). MD WASA, Raja Shaukat Mehmood in answer to a question said that the only way to meet the water shortages in Rawalpindi and Islamabad was the Ghazibarotha project.
