ISLAMABAD:A five-day training workshop for technical personnel of Indus River System Authority (IRSA), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Irrigation Department (KPID) and Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR) about Water Apportionment Accord (WAA) Tool concluded here.
The personnel were not only informed about the different aspects of the WAA Tool but also trained with hands-on practice lessons, said a press release.
Through a joint collaborative historic effort – conducted under the Australia-Pakistan Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on water management – by Pakistani and Australian Governments through the Pakistan Ministry of Water Resources (MoWR), IRSA, WAPDA, Provincial Irrigation Departments (PIDs) and Australia’s national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the Water Apportionment Accord (WAA) Tool was developed over a 4-year period from 2018 to 2022.
The pre-season planning prototype was developed into the WAA Tool in 2020 with financial support from the Government of Australia through its Australian High Commission in Islamabad and CSIRO.
CSIRO Experts also briefed the Authority about the progress and positive outcome of the on-going training workshops.
Due to the importance of the training component, CSIRO Experts Dr. Mobin-ud-Din Ahmad as Team Leader and Ms Susan Cuddy as Senior Scientist, along with assistance rendered by technical personnel of IRSA, conducted a series of technical training workshops from 29th November to 8th December 2022, it was further said.
The CSIRO Experts said that the cooperation and technical advice rendered by the IRSA Members and Operation Section personnel during the development phase was indeed commendable and pivotal for comprehension of the complex system operational steps and procedures, which were then translated and coded into the Tool for efficient and time-saving automated operations.
The CSIRO Experts very much appreciated the enthusiasm and proactive interest of the lower riparian stakeholders, especially Sindh Irrigation Department (SID), during the Tool development period and the training sessions also.
Chief Engineering Advisor MoWR informed that effective implementation of the WAA 1991 was a major objective of the National Water Policy (NWP) 2018 and the inducting of the Tool to aid in regular system operations is an important step towards achieving the said NWP 2018 objective. It was also unanimously agreed that for the continued development / updating of the Tool, a local scientific software engineer would be preferable. In order to support CSIRO in further development of the Tool, ways and means would be explored and identified by MoWR, IRSA and CSIRO, including identification and engagement of interested local and international donors for financial assistance of CSIRO.
The first workshop was conducted for the lower riparian stakeholders of Sindh and Balochistan at Karachi on 29th and 30th November 2022, attended by concerned technical personnel of Sindh and Balochistan Irrigation Departments and Mehran University of Engineering and Technology (MUET).
The attendees were initially introduced to the basic objectives and later run through the different system planning steps of the Tool in an interactive hands-on practice session with open discussion and query in-between and afterward.