The World Bank will provide technical assistance of $5 million for Project Management and Future Studies under "Water Sector Capacity Building and Advisory Services Project (WCAP), which will support the Pakistan Government, in particular the Ministry of Water and Power (MoWP) with project management.
In an update project report, three Environmental and Social Safeguards Specialists of WB, Chaohua Zhang, Sanjay Srivastava and Javaid Afzal mentioned that the TA project mainly features capacity development of the borrower in water resources development and management - spread across the entire Indus Basin Irrigation System.
No physical works are envisaged under the TA loan and both MoWP and Wapda will be capacitated in undertaking various technical studies for water resources development and management. Two of the three counterpart agencies MoWP and the Planning Commission are located in Islamabad while Wapda is housed in Lahore.
WB experts mentioned that the Indus Basin irrigation system itself is characterised with gently rolling mountains in the upper Punjab to flat plains of Punjab and Sindh. Most of the Basin system is well developed and presents wheat-rice, wheat-cotton or wheat-sugarcane cropping pattern. Though area under orchard, vegetables and other high value crops is increasing. MoWP per se does not have separate environmental unit at its headquarters though Wapda, a water resources development authority as ministry's functionary has had dedicated directorate for environmental management. The Planning Commission on the other hand also runs a fully developed environment section, which reviews the adequacy of coverage for environmental management of development projects, besides a number of other activities. Since responsibility for the planning, design and implementation of water resources development project rests with Wada, during the implementation of the TA loan, capacity of the environment directorate of Wapda will be evaluated and enhanced, if required.
Similarly, the environment section of the Planning Commission has been under heavy load of ensuring environmental prudence ever since the Prime Minister's directive in 2005 to integrate environmental management in all the PC-Is of the development projects, it is imperative to review their capacity and enhance where necessary. In case of MoWP, IPDF will be asked to designate one of their senior technical officer as an environment focal person to oversee and ensure compliance by the ministry's main functionaries with the country's regulatory and Bank's safeguards policies requirements, they added.