According to Iran’s Power Minister, hundreds of cities in the country, including some provincial centers, face serious water shortages. He promised to reduce this problem “in the shortest time to the minimum possible level.”
Ali Akbar Mohammadi announced that around 300 cities, including some major cities and provincial centers, are facing water stress conditions, and stated that the Ibrahim Raisi government is committed to making greater efforts to solve this problem.
According to the Tasnim News Agency, citing Iran’s Power Minister: “To reduce the water stress problem, we have launched new plans including water transfer lines, construction of treatment plants, and the use of new water resources in order to bring this problem to its minimum possible level in the shortest time.”
Mohammadi did not provide clarification on where the water transfer lines will transport water or how new water sources will be created.
An Old Problem and Ineffective Solutions
Iran is among countries severely facing water shortage problems. Government officials in past decades have repeatedly promised to make all efforts to solve this problem, but no results have been achieved so far.
In this regard, all governments in the past 43 years and the “Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters,” the most important economic arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, have not achieved the slightest success. The Ahmadinejad government took reckless dam construction and water transfer measures to solve this problem, which ultimately worsened the issue. In just one failed initiative in the early 2010s, water was transferred from the Dez tributaries to Qom, and the government at that time announced that it had launched “one of the Middle East’s largest water projects.”
For this project, 740 billion tomans in budget allocation, 120 million euros in foreign exchange credits from the government, 230 million euros from the foreign currency reserve fund by order of Ali Khamenei, and similar amounts from the Islamic Development Bank Fund were spent.
The Rouhani Government’s Efforts
Isa Kalantari, Hassan Rouhani’s deputy and former head of the Environmental Protection Organization, repeatedly criticized the Ahmadinejad government for reckless dam construction, but went further in September 2017 and said: “Everything that has befallen the environmental sector has occurred over the past four decades. Before that time, many environmental indicators in the country, such as water, were in appropriate positions.”
Kalantari pretended that the Rouhani government was more concerned with solving this great problem than others, but like other governments, it planned to transfer water from one place to another. Among the most important projects of the Rouhani government, 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 government is also making similar efforts, and apparently has no financial problems for implementing projects envisioned for this purpose.
Ali Akbar Mohammadi, while emphasizing that solving this problem “ranks at the top of infrastructure plans,” stated that the government has no concerns about securing funding for new projects and “various measures have been considered for it in the 1401 budget.”
Source: DW
