The Kalabagh Dam remains perhaps the most divisive infrastructural proposal in Pakistan’s history, a project that has hovered in the national imagination since the early 1950s yet has never escaped the political quicksand of interprovincial distrust. Conceived as an ambitious solution to Pakistan’s recurring water and energy crises, the dam has instead become a symbol of federal-provincial fracture—an emblem not of national unity, but of national paralysis.
At the core of the controversy lies a fear that the dam, while promising irrigation and electricity, would disproportionately privilege Punjab at the expense of Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. According to the design, two major irrigation canals would accompany the structure, both oriented towards Punjab, thereby reducing downstream flows below Kotri Barrage on the Indus to nearly nothing. Sindh has long argued that this would devastate its agriculture, accelerate salinity, and imperil its ecological survival, while Khyber Pakhtunkhwa contends that its own water share would be siphoned away. What both provinces demand is not a blanket rejection of dams, but an assurance that any such project safeguards their lifelines as much as it sustains Punjab’s.
The sudden fissure within the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf over the Kalabagh Dam has once again thrust the country’s most polarising water project into the national conversation. By forcefully declaring his support for the dam, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Ali Amin Gandapur unsettled the careful ambiguity that PTI had long maintained on the matter. His call for consensus and his dismissal of entrenched provincial opposition as little more than political theatre echoed an old argument: that Pakistan’s survival demands bold infrastructural decisions, not provincial vetoes.
Yet Gandapur’s insistence has revealed the deep unease within his own party. Asad Qaiser, a senior stalwart, was quick to disown the remarks as personal, reminding that PTI’s official position privileges smaller dams over Kalabagh’s colossal controversy. Salman Akram Raja followed in lockstep, underscoring that Sindh and even parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa continue to reject the project and that no undertaking of this magnitude can succeed without provincial concord. Barrister Gohar Ali Khan, however, struck a more ambivalent tone, affirming the inevitability of new dams but binding their legitimacy to consensus—a position that, while cautious, still aligned him closer to Gandapur than to the party’s moderates.
Outside PTI, the reaction was swift and unforgiving. The PPP accused Gandapur of trampling over the historic resolutions of three provincial assemblies, warning that Sindh would never yield to what it perceives as an existential threat to its lifeblood, the Indus. ANP, JUI-F, and QWP dismissed the revival of Kalabagh as the flogging of a “dead horse,” urging the government to focus instead on the long-delayed Diamer-Bhasha and Mohmand projects. Yet in a rare note of divergence, Khawaja Asif welcomed Gandapur’s remarks, arguing that Pakistan’s inability to conserve water has become a national liability too grave to be sacrificed on the altar of political point-scoring.
Beyond the political theatre, however, the technical and economic case for Kalabagh also falters under scrutiny. WAPDA’s shifting estimates of water availability have long been accused of manipulation, presenting optimistic inflow figures and downplaying system losses in order to demonstrate surplus. In reality, the Indus Water Accord allocations and outflow obligations often leave little margin, and revised calculations reveal deficits rather than surpluses. The claim that Kalabagh would enable Pakistan to irrigate an additional million hectares and achieve wheat self-sufficiency similarly unravels: national agricultural commissions have shown that cultivable land is already nearly exhausted and that future gains depend more on cropping intensity and yield improvements than on expansion. Water, moreover, is not a neutral blessing; the dam risks exacerbating waterlogging and salinity, a problem so severe that the state has already committed billions to long-term drainage schemes.
The energy rationale fares no better. While promoted as a fountain of cheap and clean hydropower, the calculus changes once the social and environmental costs are tallied. Resettlement alone could demand billions, and financing is uncertain given Pakistan’s weakened credit rating and donors’ increasing reluctance to bankroll ecologically controversial projects. Even if constructed, WAPDA’s inefficiencies and institutional failures mean that cost savings are unlikely to trickle down to consumers, leaving the promise of inexpensive electricity a hollow one.
Thus, the Kalabagh Dam continues to embody a contradiction. To its advocates, it is a national necessity, an emblem of development deferred. To its detractors, it is an existential gamble that would deepen provincial inequities and ecological vulnerabilities. The truth perhaps lies in the recognition that no project of this scale can be imposed; it must be grounded in consensus and designed with safeguards that protect Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as much as it empowers Punjab. Until such trust is forged, Kalabagh will remain less a solution to Pakistan’s water and energy crises than a mirror reflecting the distrust at the heart of its federation.
