Any amount of electricity, no matter how meager, added to the national power grid, is an opportunity offered and must be taken in the same spirit. The completion of 17.4 megawatt Gomal Zam power house, a component of the Gomal Zam multipurpose Dam Project, as such can not be belittled. The dam is located on river Gomal in South Waziristan Agency of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the first in FATA.

The power house is currently on a test-run and will start providing electricity to the national grid in a month. It is interesting that the project now completed with the help of the United Stated Agency for International Development (USAID), has come exactly one hundred years after it was envisaged first in 1914 and then abandoned when the First World War broke out. However, the idea of the project remained alive and the British India government again decided to go for the construction of the dam around 1942. Yet again it was abandoned after Second World War began. Since feasibility studies and drawings were lying somewhere in WAPDA’s records, the project was undertaken during the period of Gen Pervaiz Musharraf’s regime somewhere in 2005 and WAPDA was able to find a sponsor in the USAID which provided $40 million to help complete the main dam and the power house. Another $40 million are also being provided by the same agency for the completion of irrigation component of the project and $12 million are reserved for the development of Waran Canal System.

No doubt Pakistan’s electricity woes are much higher than what is being added to the power system, built of the river’s run of water, must also be seen in e context of the area - one of most backward in the country. The project may make a psychological impact on the minds of FATA people viz a viz their deprivations because of a consistent neglect by successive governments in the past. No doubt, it is a very small project, nevertheless, it will create opportunities for the local people to get jobs and other benefits. This is because the dam, completed last year, also has the facility of an irrigation system which is nearing completion, as the project’s component. The gross storage capacity of the water reservoir is 1.14 million acre to irrigate 163,000 acres of land. The power house will contribute 91 million units of electricity annually to the system, which is sufficient for about 25,000 households. Gomal Zam Dam is immensely important for socio-economic uplift of the populace of remote areas, FATA in particular and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa at large.

Now that a project has more or less been completed, it will be pertinent to mention another such project in FATA’s Bara tehsil of Khyber agency on river Tangi, another multipurpose of almost same in size and features. The WAPDA worked out the design and feasibility of the project most probably during the same period as Gomal Zam. All the spade work of the project is complete and the government has only to find a sponsor. If the government initiates a dialogue with the Asian Development Bank which already showed interest in it, this run of the river dam can be completed in a year so. This is but one such project in the tribal area. There are dozens of such sites if developed would not only add to the economy of Fata but the rest of the country as well.

http://www.thefrontierpost.com/category/46/