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Pakistani Officials Inspect Controversial Power Plant Site In Indian Kashmir
Jammu, India (AFP) Jul 24, 2005 A five-member Pakistani delegation inspected Sunday a controversial power project in Indian Kashmir that Islamabad says violates a World Bank-brokered treaty between the South Asian rivals. The Pakistani team led by Syed Jamat Ali Shah left for Baglihar, 190 kilometres east of Indian Kashmir's summer capital Jammu to examine the design of the 450 megawatt power project, an Indian official said. An Indian delegation accompanied the Pakistanis. Pakistan, which fears the one-billion-dollar project could deprive its wheat-bowl state of Punjab of vital irrigation water, charges that the plant violates a 44-year-old water-sharing treaty. The treaty bars India from interfering with the flow of the three rivers feeding Pakistan -- the Indus, the Chenab and the Jhelum -- but allows it to generate electricity from them. Indian Kashmir officials say the 450-megawatt Baglihar project on the Chenab River in south Kashmir does not contravene the pact and could go a long way to ending routine 12-hour blackouts plaguing the Himalayan state. Pakistan says it never approved the project's design as stipulated under the Indus Water Treaty. The row over the Baglihar Dam has been an irritant in the ongoing peace process between the nuclear rivals who have fought three wars, two over the disputed region of Kashmir which each hold in part but claim in full. The treaty is one of the neighbors' most enduring agreements and has survived the wars between them. Kashmiri power authorities insist the project, on which work began in April 1999 and is due to be completed next year, will not store water and thereby cut off the flow to Pakistan. Kashmir has the potential to generate 20,000 megawatts of power, but less than 10 percent of it has been exploited. Massive power theft has compounded the state's electricity woes with people refusing to pay power bills. Community Email This Article Comment On This Article Related Links SpaceDaily Search SpaceDaily Subscribe To SpaceDaily Express Water News - Science, Technology and Politics
Anti-Desertification Schemes Dry Up In Arid Kenya
Kibwezi, Kenya (AFP) Oct 29, 2005Elderly Boniface Musya struggles to raise a water-filled drum from the 76-foot (23-meter) well which he and his wife carved out of the bedrock for five long years with only a hammer and chisel. |
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