Ganges Barrage Project: Execution after changes in design

Planning Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal has said the government will implement the Ganges Barrage project after making changes to its design.

“We cannot abandon this. This is not a project worth abandoning,” Kamal said yesterday at a Meet the Press at the NEC conference room at the planning ministry.

A year after shelving the Ganges Barrage project for its “faulty design”, the government has now included the $5.15 billion scheme in the new Delta Plan 2100 as a top priority project.

The mega-plan was approved at the NEC meeting chaired by the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Tuesday.

As part of the Delta Plan, the barrage project is one of the 80 top priority schemes to be implemented by 2031.

The minister said the project would be financed the way other projects were in the Annual Development Programme (ADP).

Replying to a query, the planning minister said no country had objected to the implementation of the project. However, what the initial fault in the design was or what the new changes were could not be known.

At a press conference on April 11 last year, the PM said she had rejected the design and the feasibility study of the project as those were flawed. The next day, the then Water Resources Minister Anisul Islam Mahmud announced that the project to construct the 2.1km barrage in Rajbari's Pangsha had been abandoned.

In the first phase of the 100-year mega-plan, 80 projects would be implemented by 2031 at an estimated cost of about $37 billion.

Of them, the Ganges Barrage project would cost the highest.

The projects were selected from 133 priority projects chalked out by various ministries and divisions, a planning ministry official said.