Safe water difficult to find in Balochistan

The pink and white blossoms that line the roadsides in the dusty city of Quetta, capital of Balochistan Province, cannot disguise the fact that only one-third of the arid province is productive.

Most of the province’s 10 million people raise livestock or are engaged in other forms of dry land farming.

According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world’s largest global environmental network, Balochistan’s land is “highly degraded” due to over-grazing, illegal logging and other factors.

Water scarcity is at the root of the problem. Annual precipitation ranges from 50 to 500mm, with much of Balochistan lying outside the monsoon zone, and evaporation rates are extremely high.

“No government has thought of the people, or put in place schemes to provide them with safe water or other facilities,” said Farid Ahmed, provincial coordinator for the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, in Balochistan.

Photo: IRIN

A map of Pakistan and the surrounding region highlighting Balochistan Province

For women like Janum Bibi, 50, this translates into a harsh daily reality. For the past 40 years, she has walked daily from her village, about 20km from Quetta, to a small pond to fetch water. But now, water from the pond has become more brackish than ever before. “We know this water can make the children ill. But what choice do we have? There is hardly any other water available here,” she said.

Many other families in Balochistan suffer a similar plight, and as a result, water-borne disease is endemic. International aid agencies, including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), have reported that country-wide two million children aged under-five die each year due to water-borne illnesses such as dysentery or typhoid.

In Balochistan, the situation is aggravated by a severe scarcity of water, which means some women walk 10km or more each day to obtain a single container that must meet all the needs of their families.

Cyclone

The water safety situation in Balochistan has worsened as a result of the flooding in many parts of the province after Cyclone Yemyin hit coastal areas of Balochistan in June 2007 and resulted in existing water sources being contaminated.

Some 350,000 people were displaced, 15 out of Balochistan’s 29 districts were affected, and thousands of homes damaged or destroyed.

Photo: Kamila Hyat/IRIN

In many parts of Pakistan, fetching water is a daily chore for millions of women

“Many of these people have put together what limited resources they had and put up shelters of one kind or another. About 100,000 were left without homes after the cyclone, and because nothing was done for them, they had to do what they could to help themselves,” said Farooq Ahmed, a Quetta-based social activist.

But people, no matter how desperate, can do little on their own to improve the quality of the water they drink. Nor can they do much in a situation where storm waters have swept waste from open areas used as toilets into wells, ponds and other small reserves of water used for drinking purposes.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and other international agencies engaged in relief work after the cyclone had warned of the risk of water-borne disease and indeed, vaccination campaigns were carried out.

Despite that, local people say they are still suffering. Awaran District, about a 100km inland from the Balochistan coast, was one of the worst hit. It is also an area susceptible to drought, and with existing water sources polluted after the floods of 2007, Sughra Jan, 40, a housewife and mother of three from the town, said: “In villages all around here people say their children are now constantly ill. I meet mothers bringing in desperately ill kids each time I visit the doctor. Most seem to suffer recurring diarrhoea. Even my own children often fall ill.”

Photo: Kamila Hyat/IRIN

A herdsman in Pakistan's arid Balochistan province

New projects

The cyclone seems to have helped focus attention on the plight of Pakistan’s largest, but least developed, province.

In September 2007, the IUCN, with international partners, began a project entitled Balochistan Partnership for Sustainable Development. Aimed at “securing human and ecological well-being” in Balochistan over the next six years, the programme also looks at issues such as water resources, according to the IUCN.

Other organisations, such as Concern-US, UNICEF and the World Health Organization have also been active over the past year in Balochistan, and the people of the province can only hope that these efforts, alongside those of the Pakistan government, can save them from the plight inflicted by water scarcity, a lack of access to health care, virtually non-existent sanitation facilities and all the many difficulties that arise when such conditions exist month after month and year after year.

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