Severe Water Shortage in 300 Iranian Cities and Power Minister’s Promises

According to Iran’s power minister, hundreds of cities in the country, including some provincial centers, are facing serious water shortages. He promised to reduce this problem “to the minimum possible level in the shortest time.”

Ali Akbar Mohammadian announced that around 300 cities, including some major cities and provincial centers, are facing water stress conditions, stating that the Ebrahim Raisi administration is determined to make greater efforts to solve this problem.

Tasnim News Agency quoted Iran’s power minister as saying: “To reduce water stress problems, we have launched new projects including water transfer lines, construction of treatment plants, and utilization of new water resources to bring this problem to its minimum possible level in the shortest time.”

Mohammadian did not provide clarification on where water transfer lines are intended to transfer water from or to, or how new water resources would be created.

An Old Problem and Fruitless Solutions

Iran is among countries severely facing water shortage problems. Government officials have consistently promised over past decades that they would make all efforts to solve this problem, but so far no results have been achieved.

None of the 43 past governments and the “Khatam al-Anbia Construction Headquarters,” the most important economic arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, have achieved the slightest success. The Ahmadinejad administration, to solve this problem, engaged in reckless dam construction and water transfer across the country, which ultimately aggravated the problem.

Only in one failed attempt in the early 1390s, water was transferred from the Dez headwaters to Qom, and the government of that time announced that it had launched “one of the Middle East’s largest water projects.”

For this project, 740 billion tomans in credit, 120 million euros in foreign currency allocations from the government, 230 million euros ordered by Ayatollah Khamenei from the foreign exchange reserves fund, and similar amounts from the Islamic Development Bank fund were spent.

The Rouhani Administration’s Efforts

Isa Kalantari, Hassan Rouhani’s deputy and former head of the Environmental Protection Organization, repeatedly criticized the Ahmadinejad administration for reckless dam construction, but went further in September 2017 and said: “Everything that has befallen the environment over the past four decades has happened. Before that time, many of the country’s environmental indicators like water were in a proper position.”

Kalantari pretended that the Rouhani administration was more concerned with solving this enormous problem than others, but like other administrations, it planned to transfer water from one place to another. Among the most important projects of the Rouhani administration, which faced severe criticism from environmental activists and experts, were the plan to transfer water from the Caspian Sea to Semnan and the transfer of Persian Gulf water to Iran’s central plateau.

It now appears that the Raisi administration is also attempting to undertake similar measures, and apparently has no financial problems for carrying out the projects intended for this purpose.

Ali Akbar Mohammadian, while emphasizing that solving this problem “has been placed at the top of infrastructure projects,” said the government has no concerns about providing credit for new projects and “various measures have been considered for it in the 1401 budget.”

Source: DW