DAM - Water bureaucracy of Pakistan

If the objective is to ensure water security in order to support food security and economic prosperity, building dams is one the option besides many others and obsession with this single pathway to achieve this objective could be downright expensive and counterproductive. Most of the arguments supporting building such large dams are consist on number of fallacies. The most of salient of them includes

- large dam are crucial for water storage. 

It's not true. There are three types of water storage: glaciers, groundwater storage and surface storage. From among these three, there is nothing can be done about glacier. Of the remaining two, surface storage is most expensive and wasteful (due to evaporative and seepage losses). It is little wonder that in the united states alone, water storage for the last 30 years water storage has almost exclusively been undertaken in a groundwater mode. Thus, this argument does not work as far as water storage is concerned.

 - We are running out of water and we have to store for when we have less of it.

 Firstly, there is no scientifically legitimate reason under which we run out of water, even after taking climate change into consideration,  the same amount of water we have had for thousand of years and will be around for many more years. Also, dam do not create water, they store whatever water there is, if were running out of water, dams would simply be empty in that case. 

- Dam deliver cheaper electricity.

But given the capital cost, electricity produced from a dam will cost 100,000 rupees to run a 100 watt bulb. We have abundant solar power potential though which electricity cost can be 20 times cheaper. 

https://herald.dawn.com/news/1398688/dams-to-be-or-not-to-be