Sami ur Rahman
Last week, Federal Minister for interior, Mohsin Naqvi, paid a visit to the F-8 Exchange Square and Serena Square Interchange project sites in Islamabad and claimed that the construction of F-8 Underpass had been accomplished in a record 42-day span in the country’s history. The Serena Square Interchange, likewise, will be completed in a record time due to its sensitive location, he added.
Such fast-track projects that are carried out with the fabled ‘Shahbaz (Hawk) Speed’, are commendable in every sense of the word, but when such feats are witnessed by people from the less-developed areas of the country, they not only increase their inferiority complex, but also their sense of deprivation. For, projects such as these in their areas – if there are any at all – will take infinity and still won’t come to fruition.
I first visited G-B (Gilgit-Baltistan) in December, 2018, as a sponsored member of a local NGO group. Our first destination was Gilgit. I was super-surprised to see that out of 24 hours hardly 2 hours of electricity was available in this main city. And even when it was, the voltage was so low that you could only light up a 7 or 12 watt LED bulb with it or charge your cellphone, and nothing more.
Next, we went to Passu, a small village on the main KKH (Karakorum Highway) in Upper Hunza, famous for its commanding view of the majestic Passu Cones. The locals over there informed us there was no power at all in winters. What they did to fight the freezing cold was to burn wood in the bukhari, a type of iron stove, attached with a chimney-like pipe in the roof. Mountains in G-B are largely barren and are devoid of trees and woods per se. That’s to say, what little there’s in the form of poplars or fruit trees, are burned in bukharis.
After spending a couple of days in Passu, I had to see my cousin, Dr. Arshad Hussain, in Karimabad, who was teaching mathematics at the Karakorum University, Hunza campus. He had this heartwarming good news for me that in Hunza at least things were not that bleak and that out of 24 hours the electricity supply was for one full hour. Yes, you read it right, one full hour out of twenty-four.
‘Were we living in the 21st century or what?’ I screamed inside. It had been 71 years since independence. 71 years wasn’t (which is now 77) a small period to make some difference. Now, if the locals – young and old, children and women alike in sub-zero temperature – do not come out in droves on the roads to record their protest and block the KKH, what else should they do? What these poor souls have to do anyway with the billions-dollar CPEC or the trillions-dollar OBOR that just cannot cater to their basic need of electricity?
It’s true that there’s shortage of water in winter that makes it impossible to generate power for the two small facilities i.e. the mere 3-megawatt Misgar and 900 kilowatt Khyber hydropower stations that are the only official sources of electricity in Hunza. But, how about the white elephants of IPPs that gobble up billions of dollars annually from the national exchequer and – to borrow from the Urdu idiom – don’t even mind to belch? Aren’t people from the backward areas entitled to such an amenity-cum-luxury?
To ameliorate the problem, the Aga Khan Fund, like so many other social welfare projects in the region, installed a one-megawatt solar system set-up last year in Duikar village, which is commonly known as the Eagle’s Nest and is a renowned tourist attraction in Hunza. It too, however, failed to fix the problem due to low amount of sunrays in winter.
So much for the winter season that somehow makes sense. The tragedy is the issue lingers on even in summers, and though, the so-called power production doubles, that is, where there’s no power supply, it’s an hour or so in summer; where there’s an hour’s, it gets two; while that of two hours get three or four, but isn’t it a joke still?
To see that nature has endowed Hunza with a natural dam in the form of the Attabad Lake, makes the situation even more tragic. Even after passing a decade and a half, the federal government has failed to take advantage of this reservoir. Every now and then, there would be rumors that a 54 megawatt dam is going to be built, that the feasibility report is in the pipeline, that construction work is soon going to be kick-started, but nothing whatsoever is seen on the ground. It’s a classic tale of red tapism, government negligence, and extreme incompetence.
In so far as the multi-billion Diamer-Basha Dam is concerned, it is not going to be completed before 2030. Every time, there’s a new prime minister in the office, he’d visit the site in a chopper, inaugurate the already inaugurated, install a new plaque in his name, and that is all. No mention of the small and more practical Attabad Dam at all, which has the potential of not only lighting up Upper and Lower Hunza, Nagar district and Gilgit, but also decreasing the anti-Punjab sentiments that are so rampant among the locals.
If the federal government wants, it can build the three-year Attabad Dam project in the short span of a year and thus can make yet another national ‘Shahbaz Speed’ record, but to see that it is not Islamabad or Lahore, but Gilgit-Baltistan, a sense of pessimism overwhelms one’s body and soul.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
