With the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi facing dwindling water supplies owing to lower rainfall and a corresponding rise in population, a plan to provide water from Ghazi-Barotha which had been pending for the past 13 years has now been revived by the incumbent government as it has ordered to prepare a new feasibility report for the project.The decision was taken in a technical meeting chaired by the Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Capital Development Authority Affairs Ali Nawaz Awan and attended by technical teams of Capital Development Authority (CDA), Rawalpindi Development Authority (RDA) and Cantonment Boards (CBs).The new report and a project concept 1 (PC-I) of the project would be completed in three months.The previous feasibility report was rejected as it was prepared 10 years ago. Furthermore, the project cost has also soared to Rs90 billion.For the project, the federal and provincial governments have allocated Rs10 billion as initial funds. It will be initiated on the basis of public-private partnership.In this regard, the RDA Chairman Arif Abbasi endorsed the decision and said that the prime minister had ordered to start preparations for the project.The project had been conceived in 2006 when former military ruler General (retd) Pervez Musharraf was still in office. It was estimated to cost around Rs17 billion and work on the project was scheduled to commence in March 2009. It was supposed to be completed within five years’ time by 2013.It was spread over three phases. In the first phase, the twin cities were to be provided with 200 million gallons of water a day by laying a 60-kilometre-long, 80 inch-wide pipeline from the Tarbela Dam at Ghazi Barotha to a water treatment plant at Sangjani in Islamabad.In the second phase an additional 200 millions of gallons of water will be received on a daily basis while in the third phase, 255 million gallons of water will be received.Previously, due to issues over water division from the divisible pool for provinces and also the project’s overall cost, the Ghazi-Barotha water supply scheme had been pending for the past 13 years.Even though the project’s cost had ballooned to Rs85 billion by the time the incumbent Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) took over, the government allocated Rs500 million for the project.The project is supposed to be jointly funded and completed by Punjab and the federal governments.In the recently unveiled Punjab budget for the fiscal year 2019-20, the Punjab government has failed to directly mention any allocation for the Ghazi-Barotha water supply project but it has listed Rs9.568 billion for water supply projects in the province under the head of estimated expenditures. Curiously, this was down from Rs14.597 billion that the province spent on water supply schemes in the province in the outgoing fiscal year of 2018-19.The budget documents separately list Rs22.4 billion for expenditure on water supply development projects in the province.Published in The Express Tribune, July 7, 2019.lates