The Indus River System Authority (IRSA) has further reduced water outflows from Tarbela and Mangla dams during the month long closure of canals to conserve water for irrigating the strategic winter crops including wheat, grams, oilseeds, sunflower, vegetables and fodder in the months of February and March.
Punjab irrigation engineers told Business Recorder here on Monday that IRSA has reduced water outflow off Tarbela dam on river Indus from 15,000 to 10,000 cusecs against the inflow of 17, 200 cusecs, retaining 7,200 cusecs water in the dam. Similarly water discharge downstream the Mangla dam has been cut down to 6,000 cusecs which is run of the river Jhelum water.
Lahore Electricity Supply Co spokesman Javed Ahmad Khan said that the minimum outflows from the dams has drastically cut down the hydel power contribution to the national grid system of the country. He said LESCO was facing electricity short fall of 1000 MW against the demand of 2,300 MW, which has forced the utility to shut down electricity for 8 hours in the big cities and 11 hours outages in the rural areas. These are in addition to the daily forced load-shedding by the national grid networking system in Islamabad.
Meanwhile, Meteorological department has said that dense foggy conditions are likely to prevail in the plain areas of Punjab, Khyber Pakhtoonkwa and Sukkur division. Mainly cold and dry weather likely to remain in rest of the country. However isolated rain with snowfall over the hills may occur in Gilgit-Baltistan and Kashmir. Coldest places Last 24 hrs: Lowest temperature recorded in Kalam -14, Parachinar -13, , Rawalakot &Quetta -10, Hunza = -090 c.
Comments
Comments are closed.