The telemetry system, which is expected to resolve water issues among provinces through accurate distribution and monitoring, has become operational throughout the country from Tuesday, says a press release issued by the Water and Power Ministry.
Federal Water and Power Minister Liaquat Ali Jatoi during his first visit to Irsa head office had directed Wapda and the company concerned to make all 23 telemetry system sites operational at the earliest, the press release added.
The minister visited Sindh and Balochistan to resolve the pending issues and both the provinces' chief ministers had assured him of providing all assistance to Wapda to make the telemetry sites located in their provinces operational. Now the telemetry system has become operational throughout the country, and all the four provinces and the federal government would be provided a transparent monitoring system.
Liaquat Ali Jatoi, in his statement on Wednesday, said that Pakistan has got one of the best canal irrigation systems in the world, but for lack of scientific equipment necessary to provide accurate, reliable and timely information about the flows at the barrages and availability of water in the rivers.
In the absence of accurate and reliable data neither better water management nor planning can be done and nor can a situation of total trust among all the water users (entities) be achieved, he said, adding in absence of any scientific system, this dependence for information paves way for no trust situation, hampering the harmony among the provinces.
Giving objectives of the system, the minister said the automatic telemetry system will help evolve a batter water management system which takes into account all the shortcoming of that present manual procedure and processes.
The project aims at achieving the availability of on-line and accurate information of water availability and flow information at all dams/barrages which is transmitted to all the authorities concerned in parallels, the information being received and processed has the confidence of all stakeholders, to maintain databases at each location, which could subsequently be used for analyses and planning purpose, and to have the flexible system capable of being used to manage gate operations at barrages remotely if so required any time in future.
The design of the system is such that no human interference in data acquisition, communication or processing is possible. This will ensure the data tampering is practically not possible.
The project area for the purpose of data collection spreads from Tarbela to Kotri on all the rivers under Indus Basin in Pakistan and has 23 sites. The monitoring location includes federal and all provincial capitals. This includes two dams, 16 barrages/head works, 47 canals and eight monitoring locations.-PR
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