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Thursday March 28, 2024

Centre assures Sindh of funds for Karachi water scheme

By Israr Khan
May 20, 2017

ISLAMABAD: The federal government has assured the Sindh government that it will allocate required funds for the K-IV project in budget 2017/18, and two or three projects of the province will be added to the development programme.

“In the meeting of the National Economic Council, I have showed my reservations regarding the next year budgetary allocation of the province, but I was assured that the grievances of the province will be removed,” said Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah, while talking to media persons after holding meeting with Federal Minister for Water and Power Khwaja Muhammad Asif here on Friday. 

Shah said that the federal government has assured us that provincial projects will be included in the PSDP and it also gave surety that funds already allocated for the Sindh projects will be released.

The Sindh government wants to complete this project by end of February next year as to solve the issue of water availability to Karachi. This Rs25 billion project is the biggest water supply project jointly financed by the province and federal government. It intends to provide 650 million gallons of water to Karachi. The main source of water for this project will be Keenjhar Lake in Thatta, Sindh.   

For this Karachi Bulk Water Supply Scheme, the federal government has allocated one billion rupees in fiscal year 2016/17, but less than half of this amount has been released. If the government allocates Rs6.5 billion in upcoming budget, it will be completion of the center’s share in this project.    He said that Manchar Lake is the largest freshwater lake of Pakistan is fast polluting, and we are going to construct a new canal to keep it clean.  Murad Ali Shah said that the province was also given surety that the pace of work on electricity projects in the province will be fast tracked.

He said that the Sindh has retired its electricity arrears to the center, and has also received the certificate from the federal government. But, unfortunately, in interior Sindh there is pathetic situation of power outages. As holy month of Ramazan is round the corner, so the government should bring control over this issue.