CABANATUAN CITY – Conceptualized during the term of the late Pres. Corazon Aquino and eyed for implementation in 2011 by the PNoy administration, the Balog-Balog Multipurpose Dam Project (BBMDP) in San Jose, Tarlac is now set for implementation.
“We are ready to implement it,” Florencio Padernal, administrator of the National Irrigation Administration, told newsmen during the provincial water summit in Palayan City recently. He said the Board of Directors of the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) has already approved the project’s implementation and is now set to be advertised.
The project cost is P15.8 billion, he said. The dam, named after the river in Barangay Maamot in San Jose town, will have a height of 105.5 meters. It will be augmented by three cascading dams, about 25 meters high each, that will be undertaken through public-private partnership (PPP) scheme. When completed, it will irrigate 34,410 hectares in Tarlac City and in the towns of La Paz, Gerona, Pura, Ramos, Capas, Paniqui, Bamban and Concepcion.
It is expected to benefit 24,000 farmers. The big dam and the three smaller dams will have power- generating capacities of 43.5 megawatts and 5.8 megawatts, respectively. The power generation component will also be undertaken through PPP.
Padernal said NIA is targeting to increase irrigation by developing new areas and enable farmers to have two to three croppings to increase their income. He said the agency is currently fixing institutionally its delivery systems and putting up new reservoirs, including the BBMP.
The BBMP is said to be one of the priorities of Padernal since he took over from Claro Maranan last July. When he visited Concepcion, Tarlac in November 2011, Pres. Aquino expressed hope that the BBMP would be completed under his term.
When the project failed to take off, he gave a “severe scolding” to then NIA Administrator Antonio Nangel during the agency’s 50th anniversary in June 2012. He said then that if onlythe project was finished, the harvest cycle in Tarlac would have been 7.5 a year. “It’s rice already turned stone,” he lamented.
Ross Esteban, chief of the Tarlac NIA’s public affairs and information division said the President was misinformed that nothing is moving at the BBMP. With a savings of P60 million in 2012, he said they were able to irrigate 12,000 hectares.
An Italian company promised to fund the project at a cost of P2.7 billion in 1990.However, the earthquake and the Pinatubo eruptions in 1991 halted the construction. Phase I of the project, however, was only implemented in 1999 involving the development of 12,475 hectares at a cost of P2.362 billion.
Once fully operational, the BBMP will enable Tarlac to move out of its position as the tail-ender in irrigation in Central Luzon and as one of the provinces with the lowest irrigation output in the entire country. Statistics from the NIA’s Corporate Plan in 2011 showed that while Tarlac is next to Nueva Ecija as a major production center in Central Luzon, only 32,670 hectares or 29 percent of its 114,530-hectare irrigable area is irrigated, the lowest irrigation development, percentage- wise, among the seven provinces in the region.
Nueva Ecija, Bulacan, Aurora and Pampanga have considerably higher percentage of irrigation development, with each covering at least 70 percent of their respective irrigable areas based on 2011 records. The irrigation component in Tarlac is so underdeveloped that as of 2011, at least 81,860 hectares of lands were still not serviced by irrigation water, NIA officials said.
