Water comes to the rescue in northern Pakistan: The National

Tom Hussain, Foreign Correspondent

KARIMABAD, PAKISTAN // Residents of Pakistan’s northern valleys are harnessing the natural might of glacial melt to generate electricity in their remote communities, and local officials hope that further hydroelectric projects in the area will have the potential to alleviate the country’s growing energy crisis.

The five districts of the so-called Northern Areas, known historically as Gilgit-Baltistan, are isolated from the rest of Pakistan by the formidable natural buffer formed by the Himalaya, Karakorum and Hindu Kush mountain ranges.

The snow-capped region of Alpine valleys has been the source of romantic inspiration for writers for a century, even being touted as the home of the mythical Shangri la in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton.

However, development workers active in the area said such fairy tales mask the sad truth: until the completion of the Karakorum Highway (KKH), a narrow 1,300-km road between Islamabad and the Chinese border in 1978, its communities were undernourished because of the tremendous difficulties in channelling water for irrigation, and frequently fell victim to cholera because of contamination of the water they did obtain from glacial streams.

A poignant example is the hamlet of Murtazabad in the Hunza Valley, which for some 100 years was the setting for an epic struggle between the community and the sheer, unstable slopes down which cascaded the water they needed.

Veterans of the struggle to tame a 100-metre-long natural channel have passed down stories of how, time and again, the efforts of men working without the skills or tools of modern engineering were frustrated and killed by the temperamental terrain, said Naeem-ud-Din Dinal, a development consultant with the Karakorum Area Development Organisation, an NGO.

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