PM urged to make Keti Bandar third largest seaport

HYDERABAD: The Sindh Abadgar Board (SAB), the most powerful body of farmers in the province, in a letter to the prime minister on Monday suggested the revival of Keti Bandar into the third largest seaport of the country.
SAB president, Abdul Majeed Nizamani, on behalf of the farmers’ community, argues that more than half a century ago, when dams were not built upstream, Keti Bandar had been the hub of international trade activities in Sindh.
The once beautiful flourishing delta consisted of vast agriculture lands brimming with marine resources. Ships from as far as Europe used to anchor here, the letter said.
Keti Bandar was once famous for vast fields of crops like rice, betel leaf and banana, and poultry farming was also a lucrative business, but the residents have now run out of all the income generation options due to the decreasing water level in the Indus River.
Its main produce were rice, coal, desi ghee, butter and wood. The area was ideal for the production of banana, coconuts, melons and watermelons but due to unavailability of irrigation water downstream, it suffered badly.
The letter says that since Keti Bandar is located in the coastal area having mild climatic condition, hence a variety of crops can be grown as off-season crops if their agriculture development may be considered by providing irrigation water downstream of the Indus River.
The Keti Bandar Port can easily be connected with the Lahore-Karachi Motorway (LKM). In fact, the LKM under the CPEC can easily be branched off at Nooriabad to Keti Bandar which is only 170 kilometers from the junction.
Alternatively, a new highway along the eastern border of Sindh can be constructed to connect Keti Bandar with Sukkur and onwards. The new highway will pass through Sujawal, Badin, Mirpurkhas, Sanghar and Khairpur.
The new road would also act as an alternative to the existing National Highway and the motorway in case of floods or any other disturbances.The Keti Bandar Port has the potential to facilitate much bigger vessels compared to the existing capacity of the two ports.
Located in the proximity of Karachi and accessible to railway and highway networks, the port can save almost 24 hours to the mainstream for the offloaded cargo compared to Gwadar which is more than 600 kilometers off Karachi.
Sadly, the PPP government did not make any serious effort to resuscitate the project when it was in power. The CPEC can be embellished with this high value project that will give an unprecedented boost to the national economy, the letter said.