MANAGING WATER RESOURCES IN RAPIDLY GROWIN IN CITIES OF PAKISTAN

MANAGING WATER RESOURCES IN RAPIDLY GROWIN IN CITIES OF PAKISTAN

BY FARZANA PANHWAR

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INTRODUCTION
In Pakistan large metropolises like Karachi, Lahore, Faisalabad, Multan, Peshawar, Hyderabad and Sukkur get water from the river Indus having salinity of about 150 ppm in form of various salts and non harmful. Cities like Quetta get supply from ground water and part of Karachi also gets stored water from Hub river reservoirs. Islamabad gets water from a lake filled by rainwater, the problem with water supply with ground or store rainwater is high calcium carbonate accumulated from adjoining water bearing strata. The cities have risen so fast that one has to put-up with whatever water is available atleast for the present.
CONSTRAINTS OF THE GOVERNMENT
Water supply lines have laid down over 40-50 years back and careless contractors and irresponsible engineers have late faulty water supply lines which leaked in surrounding over years and when there is pressure in the water line reduced due to pumping or lack of water from the surroundings leaked-backed in the water supply lines. This water contains many pathogens, salts, soil-dirt, nitrate from decaying roots of trees, roots, shrubs and grasses. It is not possible to replace 100% lines and even it was possible there is no guarantee that there would be water-tight. The only way out is the water is properly filtered by the individual consumers, boiled for re-use. Government does have over-head water-tanks in different localities and pathogen can be killed by various devices including ultraviolet light. But again pathogen could be added between over-head tank and consumers out-lets. Individual house-hold have to be trained.
In metropolis like Karachi having over 10 million people. The area is divided into five districts and at one time total political representation of Karachi came from an ethnic group belonging to two district to favour their own people they diverted water to the two districts, re-designed the water inlets to there areas and leaving only 33% for rest of the areas. Thus there is water shortage which only partially meet by supplying water in tank lorries. Tankers charge people unofficially two fold and some times they supply drainage water from industrial areas containing excess quantity of lead and heavy metals besides pathogens, they also supply ground water which has high pH and high salts occurring in the soils and also pathogens. Karachi is already facing serious problem of hapititus-B, kidney stones, gall bladder-stones, stomach ulcers, dysentery, diarrhoea and other serious diseases caused by polluted water.
The problem of the government is to educate people to overcome above obstacle and also to train the house-holds how to solve the problem.
PROBLEMS

The city water-supply is designed at 40 imperial gallon/head/day, cities are not getting half as much water as.

There is a competition between agriculture and domestic need. Pakistan being an agriculture country already has shortage of water for the purpose, same is the case with industry.

SOLUTIONS

Solutions lies on conservation of water at all levels. The agriculture and industry should resort to sprinkler, trickle and modified methods to irrigation instead of flood irrigation. The water is so saved should be used for bringing extra land under cultivation as intensity of cultivation in Pakistan is far below 150?, as planned.

Industry should recycled its water as far as possible and reused it.

City water drainage should be recycled for agriculture and ground-water recharged after removing hazardous chemicals and pathogens, Pakistan cities have vast agriculture land surrounding them and drainage water could add many million acre feet of water to surrounding waters. Water saved from irrigation requirements can be diverted to cities and industry.

Special training courses need to be designed and imparted to various stake holders namely; water supply and drainage engineers, and adminstrators, farmers to use properly the drainage and industry recycled water, households for carefully handling water from the tape line to get-rid of pathogens and farmers to learn new methods of irrigation to safe water.

Since at present water-tax collection is based on area of the properly and not actually consumption, meters have to be installed and consumers charge as per charge of water lifted.

In order to collect water tax private contractor should be engaged on contact basis and they may be required to collect 100% taxes.

Charges of water for agriculture, industry and domestic need may be fixed on the basis of quantity consumed. In case of agriculture type of crop grown may be an additional criteria for fixing water charges.

Government have to provide water for charitable purposes, likes, mosque, churches, religious centres, hospitals, parks and play grounds.

Water from these sources is invariably mis-used by neighbours. Quantum for each categories may be fixed.

To carry-out these operations large number of facilities would be needed. Private sector is more efficient than the government functionaries, and private contractors should replace the government functionaries.

Government functionaries should limit themselves to supply of water to the main lines but not to the distribution lines.

Meters should be instal at all out-lets and rechecked with water drawn from the main lines into distributories lines.