Severe water shortage in 300 Iranian cities and promises from the Minister of Energy

Hundreds of cities in the country, including some provincial capitals, are facing serious water shortages, according to Iran’s energy minister, who promised to reduce the problem “to the minimum possible level in the shortest possible time.”

Ali Akbar Mehrabian, announcing the news that about 300 cities, including some large cities and provincial capitals, are in a state of water stress, said that Ebrahim Raisi's government is determined to make more efforts to solve this problem.

The Tasnim news agency quoted the Minister of Energy of the Islamic Republic as saying: "To reduce the problem of water stress, we have initiated new projects, including water transmission lines, construction of treatment plants, and use of new water sources, in order to minimize this problem in the shortest possible time."

Mehrabian has not explained where the water transmission lines are supposed to transport water or how new water sources will be created.

An old problem and fruitless solutions

Iran is among the countries that are facing severe water shortage problems. Government officials have promised in the past decades that they will do their best to solve this problem, but so far no results have been achieved.

In this regard, all the governments of the past 43 years and the “Khatam-ol-Anbia Construction Headquarters”, the most important economic arm of the Revolutionary Guards, have not achieved the slightest success. To solve this problem, the Ahmadinejad government resorted to excessive dam construction and water diversion, which ultimately exacerbated the problem.

In only one unsuccessful attempt in the early 2011s was water transferred from the headwaters of the Dez to Qom, and the government at the time announced that it had launched "one of the largest water projects in the Middle East."

For this project, 740 billion tomans of credit, 120 million euros in foreign currency credits from the government, 230 million euros on the orders of Ali Khamenei from the Foreign Exchange Reserve Fund, and similar amounts from the Islamic Development Bank fund were spent.

The efforts of the Rouhani government

Issa Kalantari, Hassan Rouhani's vice president and former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has repeatedly criticized the Ahmadinejad government for its excessive dam construction, but in October 2017, he went a step further and said: "Every disaster that has befallen the environmental sector has occurred over the past four decades. Before this period, many of the country's environmental indicators, such as water, were in a good position."

The police pretended that the Rouhani government was more concerned with solving this huge problem than others, but like other governments, it was planning to transfer water from one place to another. Among the most important plans of the Rouhani government, which faced severe criticism from activists and environmental experts, was the plan to transfer water from the Caspian Sea to Semnan and transfer water from the Persian Gulf to the central plateau of Iran.

Now it seems that the Raisi administration is also trying to take similar measures and apparently has no financial problems to carry out the projects it has planned for this purpose.

Ali Akbar Mehrabian emphasized that resolving this problem is "at the forefront of infrastructure projects," adding that the government is not concerned about financing new projects and "various measures have been considered for this in the 1401 budget."

Source: DW