Asghar Chaudhry de Naveed has been appointed for the position of interim president of the Water and Energy Development Authority (WAPDA), according to a notification issued by the Ministry of Water Resources on Saturday.
Asghar’s appointment follows the resignation of the retired Lieutenant General Sajad Ghani earlier in the day. Ghani served on paper for almost three years before giving up.
Asghar previously served as Wapda’s interim president after the resignation of the retired Lieutenant Muzamil Hussain for “personal reasons”, before transmitting the role to the retired Lieutenant Ghani in August in August 2022.
Now it will serve as president of WAPDA “for a period of three months or until the appointment of [a] Regular President […] with immediate effect and even new orders, ”said the ministry.
Asghar will assume the role in addition to its current role as a member of Wapda (finance), under the division of water resources.
Asghar previously accompanied Ghani while visiting important projects during his time as president, such as the construction of Mohmand Dam on the Swat River.
In May, Ghani visited the Neelum-Jhelum hydroelectric project, located approximately 41 km from Muzaffrabad, after the dam site was damaged in Indian attacks one day before.
He strongly condemned the attack, saying: “International laws, including the Geneva Convention, do not allow to attack water structures even during a large -scale war.”
Also in May, he persuaded the participants of a Jirga to cancel a two weeks, assuring them that Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had constituted a committee to address the concerns of families whose lands had been acquired for the Hydropower Dasu project.
Later that month, Ghani said that several key objectives were achieved in the Karachi bulk water supply scheme, better known as the K-IV project.
Underlining the importance of the K-IV project for Karachi, which was formally launched in 2011, the president of WAPDA ordered the project team to accelerate construction activities to meet the deadlines.
However, the project immediately faced a new setback this month, since the federal government has assigned only RS3.2 billion in the budget against the required amount of RS40BN for the scheme, which caused fears that the city has to wait “another 10 years” or more for the completion of the plan.
Previously, in April, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) highlighted obvious inefficiencies and a massive bad financial management in national key hydroelectric energy projects, in particular the DASSU Hydropower project and the Neelum-Jhelum hydrovopter project.
