Just a week after the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council approved an increase in the cost of the Neelum-Jhelum Hydroelectric Project at Rs506.81 billion, and a month after former prime minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi inaugurated the project, one of its four units has shut operations after it started leaking oil. Another unit had already been closed because of a damaged rotor and is not expected to be back on board for anywhere from four to nine months. A third unit is barely producing any electricity. At this point, it would be fair to say that the entire project has been a disaster. Since it was first proposed in 1989, the cost of Neelum-Jhelum has increased from Rs15.3 billion to its current amount of over Rs500 billion. In that time, India has taken advantage of Pakistan’s inability to complete the project by constructing the Kishanganga and Rutle dams and siphoning off water that would otherwise have come to us. By changing the reality on the ground, India has made Pakistan’s chances of getting a favourable ruling from the World Bank or the International Court of Arbitration on the division of water between the two countries less likely. For that, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
There could be an additional scandal in the latest technical problem to hit the Neelum-Jhelum Hydroelectric Project. There are reports that the oil leak in the unit started more than a week ago but the management of the project decided not to shut it down until the government completed its tenure. If that is indeed true, it would mean that the risk of further damaged was taken just to avoid making the government look bad. An inquiry needs to be carried out to find out if this happened. The question of what is to be done with the project itself will now need to be decided by the next government. It is too late to abandon the project altogether and so steps need to be taken to make it fully operational. As this summer has shown, Pakistan’s power generation capabilities still fall far short of the amount required. Neelum-Jhelum was supposed to be a solution to that problem but mismanagement has led only to it being exacerbated.