DESCRIPTION LOCATION CONSTRUCTION DETAILS CAUSES OF DELAY BENEFITS FEATURES LIFESPAN

1. Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology
(VNIT Nagpur)
Topic Of Presentation :-
TARBELA DAM
Submitted To : Presented By :
Dr. Ashwini Mirajkar Gaurav Gautam
( Assistant Prof. ) ( MT21WRE012 )

2. Outline Of Presentation :-
 Description
 Location
 Construction Details
 Cause of Delay
 Features
 Benefits
 Lifespan
 References

3. Description :-
• Tarbela dam is the largest Earth Rock filled dam in the world.
• It is the fifth largest dam by structural volume .
• It is also the second largest dam in terms of reservoir capacity in the
world .
• It is also the highest dam in Pakistan .

5. Location :-
• The dam is built on one of the worlds largest river : The Indus
known as the “Abbasin” or “ The father of Rivers” .
• Located in the “Swabi” ( Khyber Pakhtunkhwa ) mainly and in some
area of “Haripur District” of the province .
• Coordinates of Dam are 34.0875° N & 72.6990° E .

6. Construction :-
• Construction of Dam began in 1968 and has to be completed in the year 1976 .
• The dam was operational in 1976 but its completion occur in 1984 .
• The dam has to be completed in the duration of 8 years but it take 16 years to
completed .
• Construction is undertaken by Italian firm “Salini Impregilo” .

7. Cause of delay :-
• Around 70 sinkholes in the reservoir bed appeared which they tried to covering
between 1975 and 1978 by dumping thousands of tonnes of Earth .
• One sinkhole that appeared in 1984 was still there till 1991 .

8. Features :-
• The total height of dam is 143.26 m ( 470 ft. ) from the river level and length is
2743.2 m ( 9000 ft. ) .
• The Width of Tarbela dam at its base is 600m .
• The Reservoir Capacity is 13.69 cubic Km ( 3.28 cu mi ) .
• Its catchment area is 168000 km2 ( 6500 sq. mi ) .
• Estimated cost of project was $800 million .
• Total cost of project was $1.697 billion .

9. Benefits :-
• The primary Objective of Dam was to supply water for irrigation by storing flows during
the monsoon and subsequently releasing stored water during low flows in winters .
• The purpose was to compensate for the loss of Water supplies of eastern rivers
( Ravi,Sutlej,Beas ) .
• Tarbela has generated 341.139 billion kwh cheap hydro-electricity energy since
commissioning .
• Project recover its total cost of construction in 10 years and now the project gives the
benefit to the economy of Pakistan .

10. Lifespan :-
• Because the source of Indus River is glacial melt water from the Himalayas, the
river carries huge amount of sediments with the annual suspended sediments load
of 200 million tons.
• Live storage capacity of Tarbela reservoir had declined more than 33.5% to 6.434
million acre feet (MAF) against its original capacity 9.69 MAF because of
sedimentation over 38 years .
• The useful life of the dam and reservoir was estimated to be approximately 50
Years . However , sedimentation has been much lower than predicted , and it is
now estimated that the useful lifespan of the dam will be 85 years , to about 2060

11. References :-
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarbela_Dam (Wikipedia )
• https://www.water-technology.net/projects/tarbela-dam-project/
(Google)

12. THANK- YOU