Focus on potable water shortage in Kyzyl-Orda Province

For 46-year-old Maira Omirbayeva, just getting a pail of water can be a real chore. Standing outside her humble home in the tiny dust-blown village of Tokabay, 50 km north of the former Aral Sea fishing town of Aralsk, she depends for safe drinking water on deliveries by tanker truck. "Sometimes the water is not enough and we have to wait up to two or three days," she told IRIN, noting that people often had to borrow from neighbours just to get by. "Water is everything for us, but we understand that more and more now." Tokabay, like many Kazakh rural villages, exemplifies the hardship experienced by many impoverished communities in the south-central province of Kyzyl-Orda in trying to receive what most people view as a basic necessity. Access to clean water remains a key challenge in Kazakhstan, and government officials are still working on how to address it. As part of the country's millennium development goals, the Astana hopes to halve the number of people without access to safe drinking water by 2015. However, the task remains immense. According to official statistics, almost 74 percent of all households (numbering 105,105) in the province have no water supply - more than double the national average. The main sources of potable water in the region are the Syrdar'ya river, underground water, and the antiquated Soviet built Aral to Sor-Bulak water pipeline. Given the high salinity of underground water in the area, the inhabitants of most remote villages drilled boreholes and installed desalination equipment decades ago. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was soon followed by the collapse of much of the infrastructure providing thousands of households in rural Kazakhstan with water.

Evidence of desertification in and around Tokabay

Under the Soviets, water management was highly centralised, with little or no concern for economic viability. "Water was heavily subsidised for people and not a valued commodity," Igor Zhaksylykov, a national programme officer for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), told IRIN in the provincial capital, Kyzyl-Orda. "Today, what remains is an antiquated infrastructure unable to cope with the demand." Long before the Russians arrived in Central Asia, the use of water in the vast region, then known as Turkestan was governed by Muslim tradition. During that time, water management was the responsibility of each village, with strict rules governing use and access. However, according to the book entitled "Aral - Problems and Perspectives of Aral's [Sea] Crisis]", these traditional ways of governing the resource were soon lost after the arrival of the Russians - not just for potable water, but also irrigation. After conquering the khanates of what was then Turkestan in the late 19th century, the Russians began replacing the region's largely small-scale, sustainable irrigation systems with larger ones designed to irrigate vast expanses of arid land, particularly in the 1920s.

Konakbay Dosayev, president of the Barshakum water user association and their tanker

The fate of the region was sealed in the late 1950s when the Soviet empire's central planners decided to put vast areas of irrigated land under cotton, a process involving the use of massive amounts of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. To fulfil their objective, the planners diverted water from the region's two largest rivers, the Amudar'ya and the Syrdar'ya, which feed the Aral Sea, thereby launching an ecological disaster in the areas surrounding what was once the world's fourth-largest inland sea. Not only were the region's limited water supplies squandered, but both surface and ground water absorbed large quantities of pollutants from agriculture and industry, leading to a progressive shrinkage in the availability of potable water. According to the book, each rural resident now receives, on average, only 15 litres of water per day - far less than the 125 litre national average; the rate in the provincial capital, Kyzyl-Orda, is 40 litres. In most rural areas, drinking water is supplied for only one or two hours a day, while crisis-hit communities may not get water for days at a time. In fact, of the larger wells in Kyzyl-Orda province, only 24 are still operating, the result being that the availability of safe drinking water is now extremely limited. "Some people are drinking from irrigation canals and ingest the pollutants inside," Zhaksylykov said. In Tokabay and surrounding villages, which largely depend on animal husbandry, the situation is exacerbated by climatic changes caused by the shrinkage of the Aral Sea. Rainfall, too, has declined and desertification is spreading. Once 50 km from the sea, Tokabay is now 120 km away and, situated in a very dry area, sand dunes are beginning to encroach on it. Meanwhile, the mineral content of the local underground water now stands at between two and four grammes per litre. "This is very bad. State norms say it should be no more than one," the UNDP official said, noting that in some villages closer to the shoreline, the mineral content was as high as 10. Unfit for human consumption, residents use this water largely for livestock. Today, many villages in the region rely on local NGOs for water. According to Konakbay Dosayev, the president of the Barshakum water user association - one of 15 such NGOs - meeting the needs of Tokabay's 142 households is no easy task. Each day the NGO's Canadian-funded tanker makes two deliveries of 3,600 litres from Tokabay's two wells. "Sometimes the demand is more, but we don't have the capacity," Dosayev said, noting that sometimes there was insufficient water in the wells to fulfil the quota. One tanker load of water costs the equivalent of US $2 and generally lasts a family two weeks. "We can afford this, but we can't manage with our current capacity," he said. The government, over the past two or three years, has drilled new boreholes and rehabilitated existing ones throughout the region. However, the mineral content of the water from many of the boreholes exceeds the potability limit.

Borehole #4 will soon be getting a facelift

Meanwhile, back in Tokabay, about to be launched is a pilot project to rehabilitate and boost the capacity of a nearby borehole. The operation will be funded by the UNDP and the Global Environmental Facility/Small Grants Programme. As part of the $165,000 effort, a small desalination plant will also be established, as well as a hybrid power generating system consisting of solar panels and wind turbines. But such efforts are small given the gravity of the problem - a reminder that far more resources are needed to meet the challenge head on, while Askar Husayinov, executive director of an NGO umbrella group in the area said responsibility for water management must be returned to the people who actually use it. "People should understand the gravity of the problem with regard to water and their responsibility - not necessarily relying on the government," he said.