President Asif Ali Zardari has announced building of some 32 dams in the country at a cost of 700 million dollars, roughly 22 million dollars per dam. What is not disclosed is the total water storage capacity that we would have increased with these dams. Nor are any figures for the area to be irrigated and power generated in all. Comparing it with about seven billion dollars we require for Kalabagh dam, which would store 6.1 MAF of water and generate 3200 MW of power, the people would like to know what is the cost per acre of irrigated land and per kilowatt of power to be had from these mini dams? Another question is the location of these dams; they obviously cannot be built on the three western rivers including Indus. Depending on erratic rains to fill these dams would be unrealistic. These mini dams would at best serve local demand in a limited manner but at a very exorbitant cost. Would it not be judicious to build one mega dam to equate with 200 small dams, which would have manifold chances of corruption due to diffused control? PPP could win over people of Pakistan by building a mega dam in Punjab. -DR M. YAQOOB BHATTI, Lahore, January 15.