Buthidaung municipal engineer said The project is situated on the Sai Din Waterfall, the largest waterfall in Arakan, and it is estimated it will have a capacity of 70 megawatts.”
Burmese governments in the past tried to establish a hydropower on the Sai Din Waterfall but failed because of several road blocks.
In 1952, one foreign engineer was killed by a group from the Burma Communist Party while he was working on a hydropower project in the region. After the incident, the government ceased the work on the plant.
In 1988, soon after the SLORC took power, the government informed that it would establish a hydropower plant at the waterfall but three years later the project was delayed for unknown reasons.
The Burmese military government restarted the project in 2009 after the Arakanese community blamed the government for their overlook of Arakan’s development and the short 2-hour supply of electricity that Arakanese towns obtain every day.
The engineer said, I’m sure this time the government will set up the power plant despite previous projects failing, because many materials are arriving at the construction site and many engineers are working at the site currently.
The Burmese military junta informed publicly in January 2009 that the government would set up two large projects comprising of the Sai Din hydropower plant and a railway route in Arakan State, with the plan of developing the region.
