Wapda Signs Rs133 Billion Contract for Diamer-Bhasha Dam Gates and Steel Works

Wapda signed a Rs133.18 billion contract on Saturday for the gates and steel structures that will regulate water flow at the Diamer-Bhasha Dam, the latest component of a hydropower project whose overall cost has more than doubled since it was approved.

The hydro-mechanical contract, known as HM-1, went to a joint venture of Power China and IKAN at a signing ceremony at Wapda House. Diamer-Bhasha Dam Project chief engineer and project director Arif Ali signed for Wapda, and Ling Jianke signed as the joint venture's authorised representative, in front of Wapda chairman retired Lt Gen Muhammad Saeed, the authority's finance, water and power members, the chief executive of the Diamer-Bhasha Dam Development Company, and a joint venture delegation led by the chairman of Power China International Group Limited.

What the contract covers

The scope is the equipment that actually controls the dam's water, rather than the dam structure itself: manufacturing, supplying and installing the gates and hydraulic steel structures at the flushing tunnels on both banks, the power intakes and the dam outlets, along with steel lining, hoisting and pumping systems and the electrical works that go with them. A Wapda spokesperson called the project "a priority project of the federal government" for the country's water, food and energy security.

Once complete, Diamer-Bhasha is designed to hold 8.1 million acre-feet of water and generate 4,500 megawatts of electricity from a site on the Indus River about 40 kilometres downstream of Chilas in Gilgit-Baltistan. That storage capacity would address a gap Pakistan's water managers have flagged repeatedly this year: a 22 percent shortfall projected for this Rabi season because the country's existing reservoirs cannot hold enough water to smooth out seasonal shortages.

A cost that has more than doubled since approval

This gates-and-steel package is only one piece of a project whose price tag has grown sharply since it was first approved. Pakistan's Ministry of Water Resources said in July 2026 that the dam component's cost had risen 134 percent to Rs1.122 trillion, against an originally approved Rs479.7 billion, and pushed the completion deadline back from February 2029 to December 2030. The ministry attributed most of the increase to the rupee's slide from about Rs105 to the dollar at approval to around Rs280 now, along with revised contract pricing and added security spending. Mohmand Dam and Dasu Hydropower Stage I, Wapda's other large dam projects, have seen even steeper cost increases over the same period, the ministry said, rising 115 percent and 260 percent respectively.

The main civil works contract for Diamer-Bhasha, covering the diversion system, the dam itself, an access bridge and a smaller 21-megawatt hydropower unit at Tangir, went to a separate Power China-Frontier Works Organisation joint venture in 2020 at a value of about Rs442 billion. Saturday's HM-1 award is a later, narrower package layered on top of that original contract rather than a revision of it.

Why the timeline matters beyond this one dam

Diamer-Bhasha has been part of Pakistan's water-storage planning for decades, and its repeated cost escalation illustrates a problem that extends well past this single project: large, multi-year infrastructure contracts priced years ago in rupee terms get more expensive every time the currency weakens, regardless of how efficiently construction itself proceeds. Wapda's chairman and officials attending Saturday's signing did not give a completion date for the HM-1 package specifically, so whether this component tracks the dam's broader 2030 target or runs on its own schedule is not yet public.

Build Better Pakistan's Energy Desk is tracking Wapda's Diamer-Bhasha Dam contracts and will update this piece as further project components are awarded.