By Ajmal Khan Yousafzai
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province has intensified efforts for the inclusion of a key irrigation project in the second phase of CPEC, which experts believe could change the fortunes of nearly a million people overnight.
The Chashma Right Bank Canal (CRBC) lift-cum-gravity project is a long-pending scheme to irrigate around 300,000 acres of land especially in Dera Ismail Khan (D.I. Khan), KP’s southern districts.
These are fertile lands but are not cultivated in the absence of irrigation water.
Dr. Shoaib of Agriculture University, D.I. Khan said that the project could lift people in four to five districts of KP from extreme poverty to an unprecedented level of prosperity.
Presently, people having hundreds of acres of land here could hardly feed their families.
However, if the CRBC lift canal project is executed, these poverty-stricken people will become millionaires in a matter of days, Dr. Shoaib commented.
He labeled the project as a real game-changer scheme given its agricultural and economic impact on the vast population.
KP government has been asking the federal government to help it in executing the costly project, but the federal government has been skeptical for decades due to the nearly USD1 billion cost of the project.
However, as Pakistan accelerated paperwork for the second phase of CPEC, the KP government extensively lobbied for the project to be taken up in the 10th Joint Cooperation Committee meeting.
