Balakot Hydropower Project: LG reps urge govt to appoint locals or face protest

MANSEHRA: The people and representatives of the village and neighbourhood councils on Sunday warned the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government to accommodate locals at the 300 megawatts Balakot Hydropower Project or else they would launch a street agitation against it.

“Over 1,000 youngsters and labourers have applied for employment in different cadres at the dam for many months but none of them appointed yet,” Mian Ashraf, a local, told a meeting attended by the elders and local government representatives of as many as 48 village and neighbourhood councils in Balakot.

The meeting, which was convened to evolve a strategy, decided to block the Mansehra-Jalkhad Road at Ayub Bridge if the Pakhtunkhwa Energy Development Organisation and companies working on a multibillion rupees project didn’t appoint locals.

“If our demands are ignored by the Pedo and district administration, we will block the Mansehra-Jalkhad Road to all sorts of traffic for an indefinite period,” Ashraf said.

Javed Iqbal, the president of the central trader’s body in Balakot, told the meeting that Chief Minister Mahmood Khan had accepted all demands floated by the locals through his special assistant, Ahmad Hussain Shah.

He said that the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly’s standing committee on Energy and Power headed by its chairman, MNA Laiq Khan, also visited Balakot last month and held a meeting with district administration and decided to raise prices of over 8,000 kanals of land acquired by the district administration for the dam in 2021 and appoint locals but to no avail.

Pakhtunkhwa Energy Development Organisation (Pedo) started the

execution of the Balakot hydropower project in

March this year after the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (Ecnec) approved $750 million for it.