KARACHI: Flood Protection Sector Project-III (FPSP-III), to be undertaken across the country will improve comprehensive flood management approaches on integrated and innovative basis.
FPSP-III of National Flood Protection Plan-IV (NFPP-IV) has been referred to Ecnec for approval recently, which would be completed at the total cost of Rs95.980 billion.
According to working paper of the project, the local component of financing of the project is Rs89 billion and Rs6.90 billion would be arranged from the foreign sources. The project would be implemented in all the four provinces, Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) and Azad Jammu & Kashmir (AJ&K).
The official document of the paper indicated that Pakistan has been frequently experiencing devastating floods in the past. The 2010 floods were the worst ever floods in the history of Pakistan, when floods caused over 1985 deaths, affected about 20 million populations, 1.60 million houses were damaged, 17,553 villages and land area of around 160,000 sq.km was affected.
After the large scale damages as a result of 2010 floods followed by 2011 & 2012 floods/rains, the need for investment in flood sector gained importance. Keeping in view recent challenges including climate change, Federal Flood Commission (FFC) started working on formulation of National Flood Protection Plan-IV (NFPP-IV).
For that purpose Consultants (M/s NESPAK) were engaged in May 2013 through World Bank Funded Water Sector Capacity Building and Advisory Services Project (WCAP) for preparation of NFPP-IV for next ten years’ period.
NFPP-IV was prepared in close consultation with all stake-holders at Federal and Provincial Governments level. The draft final version of NFPP-IV was submitted by the consultants to FFC in May 2015. Through consultative process based on a series of meetings with all the Federal and Provincial stakeholders, the final draft version of NFPP-IV costing Rs332,246 million was approved by CCI in its 31st meeting held on 2nd May 2017.
Later on, the Umbrella PC-I of NFPP-IV could not be approved due to financial constraints. FFC, in close consultation with all stakeholders decided to prepare a project FPSP-III of NFPP-IV containing priority projects reflected in NFPP-IV prepared through Consultants (M/s NESPAK).
The main objective of implementation of umbrella PC-I of FPSP-III of NFPP-IV is the improvement of country-wide comprehensive flood management approaches on integrated and innovative basis by implementation of structural as well as non-structural interventions proposed under NFPP-IV.
The objectives of the project suggest that it would bring reduction in flood losses to private & public infrastructure in an economically sound manner as well as protect urban & rural areas, agricultural lands besides, vital infrastructure installations.
It would also remodel technical feasibility & detailed design studies of Barrages/Bridges and hydraulic structures, upgrade existing flood forecasting & warning facilities for better flood forecasting and upgrade & strengthen flood telemetry network.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2020