NA hears strong voice for Lowari Tunnel funding

ChitralToday Report
ISLAMABAD, July 2: Member National Assembly (MNA) Shahzada Iftikharuddin has said if timely and sufficient allocations were not made for the Lowari Tunnel, its cost would further escalate and the project of national importance would not be completed even after another 10 years.
He said that the Rs1 billion allocated for the budget in the fiscal year 2013-14 were not enough and he had spoken to Finance Minister Ishaq Dar and Planning and Development Minister Ahsan Iqbal who had promised to allocate sufficient amount for the project.
During his budget speech in the National Assembly, the MNA dwelt at length on the geostrategic and economic significance of the project. He said that for the last 30 to 40 years public representatives of Chitral, including his father, had been raising voice for the construction of the tunnel. He said due to its geographical position, Chitral remained completely cut-off from the rest of the country for over five months every winter due to the snowfall on the 10,200-foot-high Lowari tunnel. The MNA also said that since childhood he had been hearing about the potential of the access to the Central Asian markets and the Gwadar port leading to a national corridor to the landlocked countries in the north-east of Pakistan. The Lowari tunnel not only would mitigate the suffering of the people of Chitral and bring vast opportunities of development to the valley but it would also open up the mineral and other resources-rich Central Asian states to Pakistan.
Mr Iftikhar said that the work on the mega Lowari tunnel project was initiated in 2006 and was to be completed in 2009 at a cost of Rs2 billion. However, the previous government did not release funds for the project for about three years due to which work on the project was delayed. As a result of the delay, the total cost of the project has escalated to 18 billion rupees. So far, eight billion rupees have been spent on the project and at present an additional amount of Rs10 billion is required. But if the government continued allocating at the current rate of Rs1 billion each year, the mega project would not be completed even after 10 years and by then its cost would be tripled. The MNA also referred to a speech of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif during a visit to a hydropower project site in Azad Kashmir in which he had said that due to suspension of work on the project its cost had escalated from the initial Rs23 billion to 59 billion now within a few years.
The MNA said that normally people take Chitral as a backward area but if the Lowari tunnel was completed there would be vast avenues of development and the area can be turned into an engine of growth. He said that Chitral was very rich in mineral resources and there are about 50 billion tons reserves of marble and granite which are more than those in Balochistan. These are the resources which you have to tap to promote the national economy, he added.
About the energy crisis, the MNA said that by constructing a single dam on the Kabul river, about eight to 10 thousand megawatts of electricity can be generated in Chitral where the river, second largest after the Indus, originates. He said that everybody knows that without constructing a dam you cannot generate enough electricity from run of the river system. As far as the Bhasha/Dianmer dam is concerned, he added, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank have expressed their reservation to provide funds for the project saying that the project site was located in the disputed Gilgit-Baltistan. Similarly, the Kalabagh dam project also had lots of controversies and could not be commissioned. The MNA drew the attention of the government towards the potential of launching such a mega energy project from Chitral where there were no disputes or controversies involved.
Coming back to the Lowari tunnel, the MNA said that work on the project was initiated in 1970s by the then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and for that we the people of Chitral salute him. After so many years in 2006, then President Pervez Musharraf re-launched the abandoned project, he added. Mr Iftikhar said that people of Chitral never forget their benefactors and event after 40 years they remained indebted to Mr Bhutto. Then Gen Musharraf re-launched the tunnel project and rid the people of Chitral of their biggest issue and the people of Chitral are also thankful to him.
The MNA also thanked President Asif Ali Zardari for allocating 2.5 billion rupees for the construction of the Boroghil road on which the FWO is already working. The road will link the area with other parts of the district. He said if the current government allocates Rs4 billion for the tunnel project in this fiscal year, the day would not be far when cargo trucks will be rolling out to the Central Asian countries through the tunnel.