When officials first arrived in villages near Qadirabad in 2014, they brought promises wrapped in the language of progress. The Sahiwal coal-fired power plant, they told residents, would be Pakistan’s flagship energy project — a 1,320 megawatt giant that would end electricity shortages and bring prosperity to central Punjab’s fertile heartland. They promised jobs, schools, hospitals and a brighter future.

In Village 76-5R, the local member of the provincial assembly and member of the National Assembly told farmers this was a “once-in-a-generation opportunity”. China was investing billions in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), they said, and Sahiwal would be at its centre. There would be 3,700 construction jobs and 1,600 permanent positions. Technical training centres would teach youth valuable skills. Girls’ schools would be built. A hospital with seven to 10 beds would serve the community. Roads connecting villages to markets would be paved. The three most-affected villages would receive free electricity.

What officials didn’t tell communities — what they conveniently left out — was that none of this would come to pass.

What they didn’t say was that fertile fields, cultivated since the British built the Canal Colonies in the 1800s, would become a wasteland of coal ash and contaminated water. They didn’t mention that families would watch their children struggle to breathe, their orchards wither and their groundwater sink deeper into the earth year after year.

Promised as a beacon of progress and development, the decade-old Sahiwal coal-fired power plant was meant not just to address Pakistan’s crushing energy shortages but to bring prosperity to Punjab’s heartland. Instead, its bright lights have darkened the lives of those who gave up their land for it, leading to displacement, disease, environmental disaster and despair…

“ANOTHER 1947”

Muhammad Siddique’s family had worked their six murabbas [one murabba is equivalent to 25 acres] of land for generations. “We had been cultivating this land since our grandfathers’ time,” he says, his voice breaking. “Suddenly, without any real consultation, it was taken from us.”

The acquisition happened fast — too fast for most families to fathom what was happening. District officials didn’t come to negotiate. They came to inform. Through politically aligned local leaders, word spread that the land was being taken for a development project that would both serve the communities and the national interest by increasing energy production. When Siddique hesitated to accept the compensation — approximately Rs 2.07 million per acre for land worth far more — a district education official threatened him with disciplinary action.

What the government did next was particularly cunning. Instead of negotiating with family patriarchs who controlled large holdings, they unilaterally processed hereditary divisions. Compensation checks were issued directly to individual heirs, including women. A female assistant commissioner was brought in specifically to encourage women to claim their shares. While this appeared progressive on paper, it served a backhanded purpose: it atomised large landholdings into hundreds of small claims, fracturing families and preventing unified resistance.

Najam, another landowner, acknowledges bitterly that they’d failed to challenge the acquisition within the legal timeframe required by the Land Acquisition Act. By the time they mobilised, it was too late. When legal action was eventually pursued, it met a swift and decisive end. The Multan bench of the Lahore High Court dismissed the Sahiwal coal-fired power plant case, with the government’s point of view on such cases being that the land was acquired in the larger public interest, to keep the lights on nationally. According to a community elder, “This act illustrates a clear alignment of the judiciary with the executive’s interests and priorities. It left us with the widespread sentiment that institutional mechanisms were rigged against us, prioritising national-scale infrastructure over the rights and grievances of the citizens.”

One villager describes the loss as “another 1947” — invoking the trauma of Partition, when millions were stripped of their homes and lands. The comparison isn’t hyperbolic. For farming families whose identity, livelihood and generational continuity were rooted in that soil, the displacement was indeed a rupture comparable to a historical catastrophe.

The promise of jobs turned out to be perhaps the cruellest deception, if only because the plant jeopardised the existing farmland livelihoods. While officials claimed the plant would create thousands of positions, the reality is starkly different. Only 67 per cent of residents say the plant generated more than 50 jobs. A striking 27 per cent believed no jobs were created at all.

A MANUFACTURED WASTELAND

Walking through Village 76-5R, one hears the same refrain: “Not a single promise was fulfilled.”

Before the plant, farmers in the area relied on three moghas [canal water outlets] for irrigation. Now, only one functions. The Irrigation Department shut down the other two to divert water to the coal plant’s massive cooling systems. Despite repeated complaints to the executive engineer of the Lower Bari Doab Canal (LBDC), nothing has been done.

The numbers tell a grim tale. Groundwater levels have plummeted from an average depth of 68 feet to 172 feet. In Village 62-4R, the worst-affected area, water that once flowed at 100 feet now requires drilling to 250 feet. Over 80 percent of surveyed residents reported deteriorating water quality. The water that remains is often contaminated, unfit for drinking or irrigation.

Farmers have been forced to turn to expensive tube wells powered by diesel or solar. Muhammad from Village 75-5R calculated that his irrigation costs have tripled. “We tried to build our own mogha through collective effort,” he says, “but without departmental approval, it remains non-functional. They’ve left us to fend for ourselves.”

Furthermore, the air quality deterioration in the neighbourhoods around the plant is too palpable to ignore. When asked about environmental changes, 89 percent of residents say the air has grown noticeably worse since the plant began operations.

“Black soot settles over clothes left outside overnight, especially during summer,” one woman shares. Rickshaw drivers state that winter air has become increasingly polluted, making it difficult to breathe — a problem they never experienced before. One elderly resident of Village 64-5L put it simply:........

© Dawn (Magazines)