Pakistan collected Rs9 billion to build a dam and invested Rs14 billion on advertising it

While Pakistan’s overburdened dams are making heartbreaking headlines, a heavily publicised crowdsourced campaign for a “mega dam” that was meant to address the country’s ongoing flooding and power issues is embroiled in scandal.

This campaign was started by a Supreme Court judge and supported by former prime minister Imran Khan.

Pakistan’s Parliamentary Affairs Committee (PAC) claims that whereas Rs9 billion, or $40 million, was raised for the dam’s construction, Rs14 billion, or $63 million, was used to promote it. According to VICE, the now-retired judge stated that advertising for a proposed crowd-funded dam significantly exceeded the money raised for it, prompting Pakistan’s government to call him before parliament.

The Diamer-Bhasha Dam on the Indus River was first proposed in the early 1980s, but construction efforts were thwarted by a number of problems, including its location, environmental impact, and expense.

Saqib Nisar, the Supreme Court’s recently appointed chief judge at the time, made the $14 billion dam’s development a key component of his judicial activism activities in July 2018. He established a fund to raise money and asserted that common Pakistanis would contribute the enormous sums required for its completion.

At first, a sizable number of powerful Pakistanis joined. To contribute Rs1 billion, the army forfeited a share of its soldiers’ pay, and other state employees also had contributions withheld from their paychecks. The nation’s finest artists and cricket team also gave, and then-prime minister Imran Khan shared management of the fund.

The answer gave the fund more confidence, and it started to have an impact on other decisions Nisar made. Nisar even intimated at one point that he would try those who criticised the dam fund for treason.

The political system received a jolt throughout Nisar’s entire campaign. An environmental lawyer named Rafay Alam pointed out that there was no precedence for a chief justice who was already in office to start a public fundraising effort as “ludicrous” as the dam fund.

Nisar was successful in turning the dam fund into a persuasive exercise, according to Khurram Husain, an economics journalist and editor of Profit magazine: “Nisar was able to do so primarily by tying other cases he was hearing to it.” He described how a government appointment was upheld after the defendant told the court’s bench, which included Nisar, that his “client has donated all of his income to the dam fund, which delighted his Lordship tremendously.”

But as of February 2019, there was still a $6.3 billion (or Rs1.5 trillion) gap between what was raised and what was required. Amazingly, a now-retired Saqib Nisar revealed that the fundraiser’s goal was to promote awareness rather than fund the construction of the dams.

He said, “We never imagined this money would be enough to finish the project,” when speaking at a literary festival. We wished to raise awareness and convey the significance of it.

Surprisingly, Ahsan Iqbal, a member of the national assembly, had claimed the day before that more money had been raised for the dam fund through advertising than had actually been spent on it. The PAC, who has called Nisar to account, is now making these allegations. When it became apparent that the dam was not going to be completed soon after these events, many former supporters of the dam fund posted their regrets online.

A report from 2021 claimed that Pakistan would experience “total water scarcity” by 2025 despite having one of the largest irrigation systems in the world. Dams have long been viewed as the answer by Pakistan’s policymakers because of the country’s large population, agrarian economy, and ongoing power and water problems.

Husain claimed that when the first mega dam was constructed with American assistance in the 1960s, “dams caught the Pakistani imagination.

“To this day (policymakers’) imagination does not extend beyond mega dams in any water-related conversation in Pakistan, including if the conversation should be about climate change and floodings.” Alam pointed out that the “water discourse in Pakistan has been hijacked by…retired (officials).” He added that despite the environmental and social damages caused by dams, their popularity amongst policymakers was “like a fetish – this idea that a dam will cure everything.” 

Husain claimed that despite the criticism Nisar received for the fund, Pakistanis’ general fascination with dams had not diminished. Pakistan has 73 dams and reservoirs that the International Commission on Big Dams classifies as “large dams,” with a total capacity of 27.8 cubic kilometres, or the equivalent of 10 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.

The Tarbela Dam on the Indus River is the second-biggest dam in the world by structural volume (106 million cubic metres), making it the largest earth-filled dam in the world.

Dam construction is a global phenomena, as are the complicated politics and corruption that frequently surround it. When it appeared that aid building the Pergau dam in Malaysia was connected to the sale of weapons to the Malaysian military in the early 1990s, the British government came under fire for allegedly breaking its own regulations.

Although the case resulted in changes to British bribery legislation, no one was brought to justice in either nation. More recently, in 2019, the treasury secretary and other top Kenyan government officials were accused of wrongdoing in connection with financing for the Kimwarer and Arror dams. It was claimed that the officials received bribes through erroneous loan payments to an Italian insurance.

The Kimwarer dam’s tender would later be cancelled by the government, who noted that it was “neither technically nor financially viable.”

Saqib Nisar’s dam fund has been the subject of debate and scandal, but Pakistan’s “passion” for dams is unlikely to fade anytime soon. The nation is currently experiencing severe floods brought on by climate change, which have left millions of people homeless and caused tens of billions of dollars in damage to homes and businesses.

Dams “are held up as a solution to all our issues,” according to Alam. We shall keep hearing (support for dams) as long as damned fools stay in our midst.