Dam Row rocks AJK

By Khaleeq Kiani in The Dawn, Dec 22
ISLAMABAD: The federal government was shocked on Monday over the unfolding of a diplomatic fiasco arising out of a controversy between the Azad Kashmir government and state-owned companies of the South Korea over the $800 million hydropower project on River Jhelum.
Two federal ministries took pains on Monday to get themselves absolved of the responsibility and passed the blame on to the bureaucracy in Azad Kashmir for stalling the 500-megawatt hydropower project.
The action came in response to a story, ‘Bureaucracy stalls $800 million hydel project’, published in Dawn on Monday (Dec 21).
‘The ministry (of water and power) got to know about the project only on receipt of the minutes from board of investment wherein government of AJK’s NOC (no objection certificate) was sought to proceed further in the matter,’ an official statement said.
According to the ministry, it had addressed a letter to the AJK government requesting an NOC ‘which is, however, still awaited’.
It said: ‘This case has not been dealt in this ministry’.
The ministry said the government welcomed all private sector initiatives for power generation, particularly in the hydropower sector, and was pursuing 18 such projects in the private sector with a total capacity of about 6,000MW that have reached advanced stages of completion.
It, however, mentioned only an 84MW project whose sponsors had achieved financial close and had gone to the construction stage.
The Board of Investment (BoI) also confirmed bureaucratic bottlenecks in the way of the project and said a meeting with the prime minister of Azad Kashmir was convened on the initiative of the BoI chairman to overcome these constraints.
‘The statement was a message of concern … that despite foreign companies’ … interest in the construction of hydel dams in Pakistan, no dam has materialised so far.’ http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/front-page/ministries-try-to-wriggle-out-of-ajk-dam-row-229