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A five-member Pakistani delegation inspected Sunday a controversial power project in Indian Kashmir that Islamabad says violates a World Bank-brokered treaty between the South Asian rivals. The Pakistani team led by Syed Jamat Ali Shah left for Baglihar, 190 kilometres east of Indian Kashmir's summer capital Jammu to examine the design of the 450 megawatt power project, an Indian official said. An Indian delegation accompanied the Pakistanis. Pakistan, which fears the one-billion-dollar project could deprive its wheat-bowl state of Punjab of vital irrigation water, charges that the plant violates a 44-year-old water-sharing treaty. The treaty bars India from interfering with the flow of the three rivers feeding Pakistan -- the Indus, the Chenab and the Jhelum -- but allows it to generate electricity from them. Indian Kashmir officials say the 450-megawatt Baglihar project on the Chenab River in south Kashmir does not contravene the pact and could go a long way to ending routine 12-hour blackouts plaguing the Himalayan state. Pakistan says it never approved the project's design as stipulated under the Indus Water Treaty. The row over the Baglihar Dam has been an irritant in the ongoing peace process between the nuclear rivals who have fought three wars, two over the disputed region of Kashmir which each hold in part but claim in full. The treaty is one of the neighbors' most enduring agreements and has survived the wars between them. Kashmiri power authorities insist the project, on which work began in April 1999 and is due to be completed next year, will not store water and thereby cut off the flow to Pakistan. Kashmir has the potential to generate 20,000 megawatts of power, but less than 10 percent of it has been exploited. Massive power theft has compounded the state's electricity woes with people refusing to pay power bills. All rights reserved. © 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse. Related Links TerraDaily Search TerraDaily Subscribe To TerraDaily Express 
GE, Gen-Probe Form Alliance To Develop Biological Testing For The Water Industry
Trevose PA (SPX) Jul 19, 2005GE Infrastructure, Water & Process Technologies, a unit of General Electric Company, and Gen-Probe have announced that the two companies will work together on an exclusive basis to develop, manufacture and commercialize nucleic acid testing (NAT) technologies that are designed to detect the unique genetic sequences of microorganisms in selected water applications. |
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