This is apropos a Business Recorder op-ed ‘Six canals kerfuffle’ carried by the newspaper yesterday. The writer, Rashed Rahman, has rightly portrayed Sindh government’s response to Federal Minister Ahsan Iqbal’s “dismissive attitude” to Sindh’s objections to the proposed construction of six new canals on the Indus to water the Cholistan desert in Punjab.
Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Sindh president Nisar Khuhro and former chairman Senate Raza Rabbani have criticised Ahsan Iqbal for rubbishing Sindh’s objections to the project as a ‘baseless debate’. “To prove the worthy Federal Minister for Planning wrong, Khuhro and Rabbani have in no uncertain terms laid out Sindh’s case on the issue,” according to the writer.
Here I have a question to ask with a view to seeking plausible answers from the Sindh government in particular. It was last month that almost all political and religious parties, nationalist groups and civil society organizations took part in widespread rally held across Sindh against the plan of digging six canals to irrigate land in Punjab. Unfortunately, PPP was conspicuous by its absence in protests.
My question is why the Sindh government or the Sindh chapter of PPP stayed away from those protests when it too has rejected the federal and Punjab governments’ plan? Secondly, the party or its government in Sindh has done little or nothing so far to ensure that Sindh received its due share from the Indus waters. In my view, the six canals plan is more inimical to the future of Sindh’s agriculture than the seemingly shelved Kalabagh Dam project.
Nasir Husain Nizamani
Karachi
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
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