Comment by Riaz Haq on October 9, 2017 at 7:34pm

What has changed in Thar? Not much

What is unfolding in Tharparkar has all the signs of a humanitarian catastrophe. But the PPP-led provincial government has underplayed the crisis.

https://www.geo.tv/latest/161459-what-has-changed-in-thar-not-much


On paper, there are in total 390 health facilities in Thar, small and big, of which 288 are up and running – as 46 are under construction and 56 need to hire staff.

But on the ground, those figures are greatly exaggerated. At least 40 percent of these facilities are out of order, estimate residents Geo.tv spoke to.

Even if the building is there, enough doctors, nurses and medical practitioners are not available. The provincial government has yet to hire doctors to fill the 332 vacant posts in the district.

Health problems are further compounded by lack of water and other basic facilities.

Thar does not have a working irrigation system. People here are dependent on rainwater for drinking and other needs. Then, the prolonged season of dry weather, and less than normal rain, ravages the crops and food supply in the desert.

In 2016, in the drought-affected Thar, 479 children died due to malnutrition, according to the health department. 

This year, in just the first three months, 82 children have already lost their lives. This data has been collected from the government hospitals. Local health experts insist that death in the far-flung areas of the district go unreported.

The figures of mortality are alarming. What is unfolding in Thar has all the signs of a humanitarian catastrophe. Yet, the provincial government, led by the Pakistan People’s Party, has underplayed the crises.

Officials have stopped providing media with updated figures of the death toll. In the past five months, the information flowing out of the district has been blocked.


Recently, Dr. Sikandar Ali Mandhro, Sindh’s Minister for Health, visited the area. When asked by a local journalist about the number of children who died this year, he was quoted as saying, “Children can die anywhere. Why does the media not report the children dying in other parts of Sindh, such as Badin or Hyderabad, why is it focused on Thar?”

He further asked reporters to compare the mortality rate to world figures, “The number in Thar is not so extraordinary.”

Mol Ram is a resident of the village Hilario in the desert. He is disappointed with the parliamentarians his people elected.

“They [the PPP] made many promises in 2013, but since then, since the polling day, we have barely seen them. Does only our vote matter?”

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 30, 2017 at 4:31pm

#Pakistan invests $4.5 billion in Thar desert development in #Sindh

https://www.brecorder.com/2017/12/30/389797/investment-of-4-5-billi...

The Sindh Governor Muhammad Zubair has said that the investment to the tune of dollars 4.5 billion in Thar is something very significant.

He was expressing his views at an interactive session on energy held at the Governor House here on Friday.

The Governor referred to the Thar coal reserves containing 175 billion tons and said that these would help meet country energy needs for a long time to come.

The coal would not only be used for the generation of energy but would also be for provision of basic needs to the residents of the area.

Zubair said that for the betterment of infrastructure 250- bed hospital as well as schools are also being built.

The government is taking every step so that the people of Thar could benefit from the natural resources of the area.

The Governor assured that the federal government would extend every cooperation for the welfare and betterment of the people of Thar.

He informed that generation of power from Thar coal would commence from the year 2019 and this will contribute towards prosperity in the area.

Zubair said that new avenues of development would also open in Thar.

The Chief Executive Officer of Sindh Engro Coal Mine, Shamsuddin Shaikh, said on the occasion that 76 percent of jobs in Thar have been provided to the local people.

He said that the time period of the project span over 42 months but it would be completed in 36 months.

He said that first phase of the project would be executed in 2019.

The company, he added, would also adopt all the schools in Thar.

The company required 500 drivers and intermediate pass youngsters were provided training and appointed as driver with the company at the monthly salary of Rs. 30,000.

Comment by Riaz Haq on February 1, 2018 at 8:40am

Economist Magazine: "Just 1% of the vast #Thar #coal reserve discovered in 1992 could supply a fifth of #Pakistan's current #electricity generation for half a century" #CPEC #energy #infrastructure

https://www.economist.com/news/business/21736185-just-1-vast-reserv...

PAKISTAN’s enormous mineral wealth has long lain untapped. Since a 1992 geological survey spotted one of the world’s largest coal reserves in Thar, a scrubby desert in the southern province of Sindh, prospectors have hardly dug up a lump. Among those to flounder is a national hero. Samar Mubarakmand, feted for his role in Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons programme, has just shut the coal-gasification company he founded in 2010, when he vowed on live television to crack Thar.

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To such qualms, the government offers three rejoinders. First, severe power shortages have long blighted the nation, and renewable sources cannot offer the daylong, year-round power it needs. Second, coal accounts for less than 1% of current generation, compared with 70% in neighbouring India and China. And third, domestic coal would allow the country to forgo expensive imports of the fuel for newly built power stations, a drain on fast-dwindling foreign-exchange reserves.

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Eight years ago Engro bought the rights to one of Thar’s 13 blocks, containing 1% of the reserve (more than enough given the gargantuan size of the mine). To work on extraction, it formed the country’s biggest ever public-private partnership, the Sindh Engro Coal Mining Company (SECMC), in which Engro digs and the state provides infrastructure. Relying on the state can break strong firms. Engro itself almost went bankrupt in 2012 after the government refused to honour a sovereign guarantee to provide gas to one of its fertiliser plants. Yet without similar government support, no other Thar block-owners have secured financing, leaving Engro’s diggers, which began work last year, to move ahead.

The endeavour benefits from being in the group of infrastructure projects that make up the $62bn China Pakistan Economic Corridor, a hoped-for trade route. Western banks shook their heads when approached about a coal project, so Engro has relied on Chinese financing. Analysts note an irony in China’s promotion of coal abroad as it withdraws from the fuel at home. Handling the extraction at Thar is the China Machinery Engineering Corporation, a state-owned firm with expertise beyond Pakistan’s reach.

Around 126 metres below the sands of Thar, with just 20 more to go, Engro’s diggers can now almost touch their prize. When the coal is reached, as is expected in mid-2018, it will feed a pit-mouth power station constructed by Engro, and, in time, three others owned by partners in the SECMC. These stations will furnish around a fifth of the country’s electricity for the next 50 years. The financial rewards could be vast. “All my richest friends are jumping up and down [because they did not get there first]”, says the boss of one big multinational construction business.

Hurdles remain, not least complaints from nearby villagers about the disposal of the vast quantities of wastewater from the mine on their ancestral grazing lands in the form of a reservoir. In reply, Engro stresses its social work in the surrounding district of Tharparkar, the poorest in Sindh, which includes the construction of several free schools. More self-interestedly, it is training locals to drive so they can man the dump trucks that trundle day and night around the mine. According to Shamsuddin Shaikh, chief executive of Engro Powergen, the conglomerate’s energy division, Engro also has its sights on Reko Diq, a gargantuan and long-stalled copper mine in Balochistan, the least developed of Pakistan’s provinces. To tap one of the country’s two largest and most niggardly mines is hard enough. Imagine cracking them both.

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 22, 2018 at 9:00am

Thar — The Future of Pakistan

https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/307505-thar-the-future-of-pakistan...

Population of Tharparkar district is around 1.65 million and Thar is spread over both sides of India and Pakistan where the life always remained hard because of the non-availability of sweet water.

The region derives its names from Thar and Parkar. The name Thar is from Thul, the general term for sand region or sand ridges and Parkar literary means “to cross over”. The region was earlier known as Thar and Parkar, later theses became one word, Thar and Parkar coined together and formed a beautiful name Tharparkar.

The people of Thar have been underfed because the area being desert has no reliable irrigation system. The lands, whatsoever, are irrigated on rainwater. Historically, Thar receives low pour but when it receives rains it makes the desert lush green where peacocks dance and sing making the scene most fascinating.

The water is drawn out from deep water wells but that water also contains highest volume of TDH.

The people of Thar used to face various health hazard problems such as waterborne diseases, inadequate health facilities, famine and lack of basic infrastructure. Apart from it, poverty, population growth, lack of clean drinking water, unemployment and high illiteracy had trapped Tharparkar in a state of catastrophe. Therefore, people used to migrate from Thar to revering area to save them and their cattle and those who fail to migrate used to lose their dear ones and cattle, the only source of their livelihood.

Crop failure due to low rainfall, coupled with loss of small animals has greatly reduced the impoverished communities’ purchasing power. Poverty is endemic in the sparsely populated district with acute malnutrition rates in children as high as 20 per cent, well above the emergency threshold of 15 per cent.

The biggest reason perhaps of disease and death in Tharparkar is malnourishment of its mother. It is no secret that Thar people do not have access to clean water, health facilities or food because of which mothers in Tharparkar give births while their hemoglobin level is as low as four.

Death is a regular visitor at the doors of Tharparkar’s mothers. More than 190 children have died and 22,000 have been hospitalized in Tharparkar district in 2016 because of drought-related waterborne and viral diseases. Tharparkar is facing severe drought for the fourth consecutive year, and access to health services is reported to be very difficult, with families travelling an average distance of 17 km to reach the nearest health facility.

Whereas sweet water condition in Tharparkar is worst and access to water is a key problem for the district of Tharparkar, which comprises an area of 22,000 sq km. More than 1.4 million people and about five million heads of livestock live in the area, where annual rainfall averages can be as low as 9mm, and drought is common.

Barely 5 percent of the population has access to a sweet water supply. Even the district capital, Mithi, [only] gets sweet water twice in a month. Laying down water supply lines at high cost is also open to question. Most of the population relies on dug wells. The worst conditions are basically the byproduct of non-availability of basic needs of life. There are deserts in the world, which are now productive and life is more than normal. Just take the example of UAE with total area is 83,600 km and part of UAE is producing oil and gas and rest of the UAE is desert but the good planning and attention has converted the area into a most developed area.

Thar coalfield is located in Thar Desert. The deposits—16th-largest coal reserves in the world, were discovered in 1991 by Geological Survey of Pakistan (GSP) and the United States Agency for International Development.

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 7, 2018 at 7:35am

Pakistan’s pivot to coal to boost energy gets critics fired up
Plan to spend $35bn loan from China on new power stations looks set to continue under Khan

https://www.ft.com/content/5cd07544-7960-11e8-af48-190d103e32a4


Pakistan believes it may have found a way out of its long-term energy supply crisis, thanks largely to more than $35bn worth of loans provided by China under the $60bn China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

The country has experienced years of rolling blackouts that have left residents in the dark and stifled the country’s manufacturing industries.

But now it is investing in an energy technology that is fast going out of fashion in other parts of the region — coal.

Under the CPEC, Beijing is planning to spend at least $35bn building new power stations, which will be mainly coal-fired, using resources from coalfields at Thar, about 400km east of Karachi. The plans will mean building 9.5 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity — a third of the total capacity the country has already built.

This is in stark contrast with India, which recently said it would not approve any more new coal power plants — not least because the unit price of solar power has dropped below that of coal.

The previous government has defended its energy policies. Shehbaz Sharif, head of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party, which lost power in last week’s election, told the Financial Times before the vote: “We have built 11,000 megawatts of additional capacity in the space of five years, compared with 18,000 over the previous 66 years.”

And the strategy looks set to continue under the new prime minister Imran Khan, head of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party. Again speaking before the election, Mr Khan told the FT he backed using Thar coal to boost the country’s electricity supplies. “Thar coal is in a desert, it’s near the coast, and there are new technologies which now make it possible that you don’t damage the environment,” he said.

Defenders of Pakistan’s build-up of coal point out that the fuel currently accounts for a very small fraction of the country’s installed electricity capacity. In India, that figure is around 75 per cent.

They also say that with tariffs higher in Pakistan than in neighbouring countries, encouraging cheap electricity supply is essential to help develop exporting manufacturers. The average electricity tariff for industry is around $0.13 per kilowatt-hour, compared with $0.12 in India and $0.09 in Bangladesh.

Pakistan exported goods worth 8.2 per cent of its gross domestic product last year, according to the World Bank, compared with 15 per cent by Bangladesh and nearly 19 per cent by India.

“Manufacturers in India and Bangladesh get cheaper electricity than those in Pakistan do,” says Ehsan Malik, chief executive of the Pakistan Business Council. “This is particularly problematic for the garment industry, especially since all three countries make clothes at the lower end of the sector, where energy prices account for a higher proportion of costs.”

Others, however, warn that while solar prices are falling, Pakistan is building a series of large power stations that will not only pollute the environment but could also saddle the country with high debts and could even become stranded assets in the long run.

Fiza Farhan, an independent development consultant and a former director of Buksh Energy, a solar power company, says: “I have banged my head against walls for years trying to get the government to launch solar projects on mega scales.

“But it was impossible to get projects into the final stage — every time we would get to the financing stage, the government would revise the tariffs.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 30, 2019 at 9:26pm

Bloom in the desert
By Kamal SiddiqiPublished: April 15, 2019

https://tribune.com.pk/story/1950826/6-bloom-in-the-desert/

It seems now there are plans for a permanent bloom in Thar. Last week, PPP Chairperson Bilawal Bhutto Zardari inaugurated the Thar coal power plant. It is a unique project.

The power plant has the capacity to generate 660 megawatts of electricity and consists of two power generation units of 330MW each. The first such unit came online this month. The project is a coal-fired power plant in Tharparkar district, 25 kilometers from the town of Islamkot near the village of Singharo-Bitra.

The project is being developed as part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) by Sindh Engro Coal Mining Company (a joint venture between the Government of Sindh and Engro Corporation) and China Machinery Engineering Corporation in the Thar Block-II of the Thar Coalfield. For this project to move ahead, the Sindh government provided a sovereign guarantee of $700 million.

It is believed that this project will change the fortunes not only of Thar but of Pakistan as well given how indigenous fuel is being used to generate the much-needed power for the national grid.

The social aspects of this project seem to be also looked after. The villages of Senhri Dars and Thareo Halepoto are being relocated. Developers of the project also have pledged to refill coal pits once coal reserves are exhausted, and have also pledged to “plant hundreds of thousands of indigenous trees to maintain the natural ecosystem of the desert.” Nurseries have already been set up for this purpose.

This isn’t on paper. It has become a reality. At its peak, it is expected that 3,000 unskilled workers — mostly locals — will be given employment. It is very encouraging to see these people working in different positions side by side with others from all over Pakistan. We are also seeing the establishment of a campus of NED University of Engineering and Technology in Thar to help enhance skills of local people.

But to get to this point was a struggle. In his speech at the inauguration of the power plant, Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah recalled how time and again the Sindh government and interested parties were told that this project would not succeed. It took sheer grit and determination to push through and make this project succeed finally and change the fortunes of the people of Thar and Pakistan. One wonders how many more of such projects are being denied by the babus in Islamabad for reasons best known to them.

Whether it is the Islamkot Airport or the artificial lake that has been created 26 kilometers away to drain the saline water extracted from the coal mines, the Thar coal site continues to impress not only because of the technology used but also how it has started to change the lives of the people living here.

There is much to see here. The women drivers of dumper trucks who bring the coal to the power plant. The amazing sight of the open cut coal mine. The power plant itself — with its chimney — is believed to be the highest man-made structure in Pakistan today.

Thar coal is not just an achievement of the Sindh government but of Pakistan. That is why it was sad to see that no one was there from the PTI or from the Centre to celebrate the inauguration of the power plant. Old mindsets seem to continue to proliferate in the new Pakistan. We need to think of Pakistan.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 30, 2019 at 9:36pm

Kitchen gardens in Thar provide safe food for all seasons

https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/222313-Kitchen-gardens-in-Thar-pro...

Women in the Thar Desert are picking the first harvest of vegetables that they had cultivated in their fenced communal kitchen gardens before the rains. The vegetables that have yielded in less than two months are tinda (round gourd) and guar (cluster bean), the most favourable food for the community often faced with food insecurity.


Other vegetable plants and edible leaves that usually grow after rains have also sprouted in the gardens, keeping the village women happy. Under the indigenous nutrition programme, initiated by a local Rural Development Association (RDA) in 13 villages of Tehsils Islamkot and Diplo of Tharparkar District, these women feel secured in terms of having safe food at their doorsteps.

They do not use any chemical inputs to grow food, and since the land is fertile and consumes little water, the gardeners continue the inspiring practice of planting kitchen gardens during winter as well.

Women in groups have prepared larger plots inside their fenced courtyards to cultivate vegetables and edibles leaves as well as trees to fight against the prolonged dry spells and delayed rains. The recent rains have already recharged water wells for domestic purposes and irrigating the small fields inside homes.

This nutrition-sensitive initiative intends to address the endemic issue of malnutrition in the district, which has been recognised as the topmost cause of high incidents of infant and maternal mortality in recent studies conducted by government and other humanitarian organisations.

The communities are already aware of sustainable use of water, which is the most essential, expensive and very scarce commodity in the desert. The people of this region encounter frequent dryness for many months, and pay a heavy price of the impacts of extreme weather conditions in the form of malnutrition, death, and hunger.

Muhammad Siddiq leading the RDA said the association gave technical assistance for land preparation, building protective fencing, and procurement of materials, watering equipment and seasonal vegetable seeds.

The initiative intended to tackle the issue of malnutrition in the desert areas, in which mostly poor families became victims. “Women-led activities in the villages can contribute in stabilising the nutritional needs of the communities,” Siddiq said. The concept of kitchen gardens came after increasing malnutrition among children was reported from the area. It made the association motivate and mobilise women to grow their own vegetable gardens at household levels, where some organisations have installed solar water pumps with house-to house water connection.

Various vegetables seeds, including chibhir (cucumis pubescens), tinda (round gourd), bhindee (lady finger), guar (cluster bean), lokee/ kadoo (gourd), toori (zucchini), melon, and water melon, were provided to the women. Seeds for trees like suhanjna (moringa oleifera), ber (jujube), neem (azadirachta indica), and kandi (prosopis cineraria) were also made available for planting in the courtyards. Moringa and kandi are considered nutritional for both human and animal consumption. Women have access to newly installed deep water wells with hand pumps for domestic consumption as well as for irrigating the vegetable gardens. They have taken responsibilities to ensure maintenance of water facilities, vegetable gardens, and trees.

They are resolved to continue the practice of sowing vegetable seeds in summer and winter to have access to safe food. Women have been major stakeholders in cultivating seasonal crops in the rainy season, harvesting and then collecting the grains for domestic use and for dealing with the local market. However, the widespread use of tractors and machinery in agriculture since the last decade has specifically pushed women to stay idle at home, as there was little work left for them in the fields. 

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 1, 2019 at 9:59am

A farmer in Punjab is rejuvenating sand dunes though drip irrigation
Zofeen T. Ebrahim Updated June 01, 2019 


https://www.dawn.com/news/1485906

For as long as Hasan Abdullah can remember the 50-acre sandy dune on his 400-acre farmland in Sadiqabad, Pakistan’s Punjab province, was an irritant – nothing grew on it.

His farmland lies beside the vast Cholistan desert in a canal irrigated area east of the Indus River in Rahim Yar Khan district. Abdullah inherited it in 2005, when his father passed away. Until then he had been working in information technology.

In 2015, after much research, Abdullah took a “calculated risk” of cultivating the “barren” dune using the drip irrigation system. The government’s announcement of a 60% subsidy on drip irrigation was “a big incentive,” he said. Agriculture, through wasteful flood irrigation, accounts for over 80% water usage in a country facing severe water shortages.

Today, Abdullah’s dune is a sight to behold: fruit orchards have flourished in the sand. He admitted that without drip irrigation the “dune would never have produced anything.

Water mixed with fertiliser is carried out through pipes with heads known as drippers, explained Abdullah, which release a certain amount of water per minute directly to the roots of each plant across the orchard.

And because watering is precise, there is no evaporation, no run off, and no wastage.

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The power of the drip
Using drip irrigation, farmers can save up to 95% of water and reduce fertiliser use, compared to surface irrigation, according to Malik Mohammad Akram, director general of the On Farm Water Management (OFWM) wing in the Punjab government’s agriculture department. In flood irrigation – the traditional method of agriculture in the region – a farmer uses 412,000 litres per acre, while using drip irrigation the same land can be irrigated with just 232,000 litres of water, he explained.

The water on Abdullah’s dune is pumped from a canal – which is part of the Indus Basin irrigation system – into a reservoir built on the land. “Being at the tail end [of the canal system], we needed to be assured the availability of water at all times and thus we had to construct a reservoir,” said Abdullah. For years now, farmers at the head of the canals have been “stealing” water causing much misery for farmers downstream.

Costly savings
But drip irrigation is expensive. Out of Abdullah’s 40 acres of orchards on drip irrigation, 30 acres are on sand dunes and ten acres are on land adjacent to the dune, locally known as “tibba” – a small sand dune surrounded by agricultural land. On the 30 acre-dune patch, Abdullah grows oranges on 18, feutral (another variety of orange) on another six acres, lemons on five acres and on one acre he has experimented with growing olives, which bore fruit this year.

In took three years of “micromanaging the orchards” before the orange and olive trees began fruiting last year. “We hope to break even this year and next year we should be in profit,” he said. It will take another four years to recoup all his investment, he calculated.

Abdullah was the first farmer to experiment with this new approach. Among many challenges that came his way was to get his farmhands to understand the new way of watering.

Akram has had a similar experience, “It is difficult for a traditional farmer to come to terms with it. Unless he sees the soaked soil with his eyes, he cannot believe the plant has been well watered.”

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“Ours is the only farm in Pakistan that has set up a drip irrigation system over such a huge tract – and in the desert too,” said Asif Riaz Taj, who manages Infiniti Agro and Livestock Farm. Now in their fourth year, the orchards have started fruiting over 70 acres. But it will not be before its sixth year, Taj said, that they will “break even”. The drip irrigation and solar plant was installed at a cost of PKR 25 million (USD 174,000), and the monthly running cost of this farm is almost PKR 4 million (USD 28,000).

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 1, 2019 at 10:13am

#Pakistani #Punjab government giving 60% subsidy to promote #drip #irrigation in #farming for conserving #water and getting higher crop yield. Also helps save fertilizer, time, labor. #Agriculture #Pakistan https://fp.brecorder.com/2019/06/20190601483027/

The Punjab government is providing 60 percent subsidy to the growers on promotion of latest irrigation techniques including drip irrigation in the province with an aim of conserving water and getting more yield. Director General Agriculture (Water Management) Malik Muhammad Akram said that latest irrigation techniques ensure availability of water and fertilizer in time to the plants and it also ensure uniform supply of these two major ingredients to all the plants in a field. It helps attaining more per acre yield with minimum agricultural inputs, he added.

He said that it also help saving fertilizer, time, labour and water by fifty per cent while a lot of water go waste in the traditional watering techniques. He said in this system water goes to plants' roots in shape of drops. This system is also very successful on uneven land or land in Potohar or desert areas. He said there is a need to attract farmers to drip irrigation system as it would help mitigate the negative impact of water shortage or impacts of climate change thus leading the country to self-reliance in food.

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 13, 2019 at 10:35pm

#Pakistan Thar resettlement. In first phase, 36 families were given possession of residential units. Each affected family displaced from the Thar #coal block-II mining project was given Rs10,000 grant. Most beneficiaries are #Hindu. #Sindh https://www.dawn.com/news/1453922

The Sindh government on Thursday started the process of resettlement by handing over newly-built pucca houses in a model village to the families displaced by mining activities in Thar coalfield block-II.

In the first phase, 36 families were given possession of residential units in the ‘New Senhri Dars Resettlement’ village where each house was built over 1,100 square yards with three bedrooms, washroom, kitchen, sitting areas for men and women, traditional chounra (a straw-made hut), a guestroom and an animal yard. Each house is solar-powered along with main grid connection.

In the model village, 172 pucca houses were being built which would be completed by March 2019. Besides the pucca houses, the model village would be comprising a triple-storey school for 1,000 students, a market of 10 shops, separate community centres for men and women, two reverse osmosis plants to provide uninterrupted supply of clean drinking water, mosque, temple and Gauchar (pasture) area spread over 850 acres.

Congratulating the new settlers, Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah said: “The shifting of the affected families to the new houses has turned the displaced people of Thar coalfield into partners of the government.”


Earlier, each affected family displaced from the Thar coal block-II project was given Rs10,000 grant from one-off Rs950 million grant, which was approved to compensate the Thar coal project victims during the meeting held to review the water and rehabilitation schemes under way in the Tharparkar district.

In the meeting it was decided that the provincial government would pay Rs10,000 to residents who lost their homes. “We have decided to support them (the affected families) financially in addition to providing them a well-designed and well-constructed house in a township with all basic facilities such as kitchen, washrooms, corridor, veranda and courtyard where they have been given a lawn and two neem trees and more than two jobs for each affected family,” the chief minister was quoted as saying.

Mosques, mandirs, hospitals and schools would also be built near the residential areas and the government would ensure that the people of Thar were taken care of, said the chief minister.

Sindh Minister for Energy Imtiaz Ahmed Sheikh briefed the chief minister during the meeting that 60 houses had already been built, while others were under construction.

The project is spread over 9,000 kilometres and comprises 12 blocks.

The chief minister said that block-II’s relief scheme would be replicated in other blocks where residents had been displaced.

The chief minister announced on the occasion that Rs2.5 billion royalty that would be generated from the coal projects would be spent solely on the development of Thar and its residents and vowed to turn the area into “one of the most prosperous cities of the world”.

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