KABUL (TCA) — Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on June 4 inaugurated the Afghan-India Friendship Dam in Afghanistan’s western Herat province.
The dam was built with Indian aid at a cost of close to $300 million, and will provide 42 megawatts of electricity and irrigate 75,000 hectares of agricultural land.
The dam was under construction for about a decade. The project, which kicked off in 1976 and was jointly designed by Afghan and Indian engineers, was suspended due to the civil war in Afghanistan.
In his address at the dam’s inauguration, Modi said that the project would not just irrigate the fields of six hundred and forty villages in Afghanistan, but would also bring light to over two hundred and fifty thousand homes in the area.
“On this summer day, in Herat, we came together to honor and celebrate Afghan determination to build a future of prosperity. Afghans and Indians dreamt of this project in the 1970s. The lost decades speak to us about the ravages of a long drawn war. It was a war not of Afghan making, but it was one that stole the future of an entire generation of Afghans. And, when a new dawn broke over Afghanistan in 2001, we resumed the project,” the press service of the Indian Prime Minister quoted Modi as saying.
Modi also recollected that last December, he took part in the inauguration of the Afghan Parliament Building in Kabul. “It was a tribute to the epic struggle of the Afghan people to shape their future by vote and debate, not gun and violence,” he said.
Modi reiterated that he is committed to the reconstruction of war-torn Afghanistan.
Afghanistan has cultivated closer ties with India in recent years as a balance to neighboring Pakistan, which has been accused of supporting the Taliban insurgency, RFE/RL reported.
According to media reports, India is the fifth largest bilateral donor in Afghanistan, and has invested more than $2 billion into the country since the Taliban was toppled from power in 2001.
