Sir in just last few years The federal budget raised from nearly 20 billion dollars to 43 billion dollars. The budget of provincial government follows... We might be having a budget of 100 billion dollars after next 5-8 years almost double of what we have right now.
Who says that the amount is not huge otherwise it would never be an issue but you are forgetting the fact that the dam is not going to be build within an year. It will easily be split into at least 8-10 years of time. 14 billion dollars sounds a massive amount but when you divided it to 10 years its only 1.4 billion dollars... and if we just ignore one out of many projects we keep making for publicity purposes... such as Ring Road, Metro Bus, transferring 100 billion rupees from development budget into this or clearing off 500 billion rupees for circular debt in a single year. This amount of about 14 billion dollars does not sound much.
Dear, if we could "spare" 1.4 billion DOLLARS a year, we wouldn't be so overjoyed at getting $1.5 bn from saudia!
And where would we spare it from? You consider the "size" of our budget, but our expenses far outweigh our income, we have no capacity to spare!
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And hilariously enough, the projects you consider vanity, like Ring Road and Metro Bus, are the very places we can save from! You may not realise it, but given that all the material is local, and labour is cheap, these projects are VERY cheap, as compared to international market.
But that's not the saving I'm talking about. One of the MAJOR expense we face is fuel, which is NOT locally made, unlike sand, cement, brick or steel.
Can you imagine the savings of foreign exchequer if people STOP using their cars and bikes and use public transport? All that petrol and cng can be saved, we can reduce out petrol imports and cng can be used to run power plants.
Similarly, if projects like Ring Road are made, these reduce travel time and distance , which means journeys are done quicker, which in turn means less fuel is used. Again, less petrol/cng used can be turned into our advantage.
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(Big) Dams are never built with savings, by the time you save enough money, the projects has already increased in expense multiple times.
You make them with loan, which allows you get a one bulk installment immediately, which you can use to fix rates, and build immediately.
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Personally, I'm not in favour of big dams anyway, sadly the Ayub era strategy is no longer viable in current scenario, and is frankly outdated and irrelevant.
We should make many SMALLER dams, dams which we CAN afford to make with our savings.
I've heard PTi is doing something similar. (their project is very many, very small, hydel projects, distributed all over KPK) Let's see how it pans out.
