Water scarcity and contamination

Pakistani women are always walking in search of water. They walk across parched desert sands, along steep mountain paths and through newly furrowed fields.

Some wear the bright orange, yellow and red skirts and white bracelets typical of the Thar Desert, in the heart of the southern province of Sindh, while others dress more drably in thick, enveloping chadors. Most expertly balance earthen or metal pitchers on their heads. They collect it from trickling streams, from wells where wheels are turned by cattle, or from water holes that suddenly appear, shimmering like a mirage, on the browned moonscape of southwestern Balochistan Province.

For these women, obtaining water is a struggle that consumes many hard hours of their daily lives; most have never seen water running from a tap.

A question of access

Pakistan’s Ministry of Environment maintains that 70 percent of the population has access to piped water, but experts such as Q.Isa Daudpota dispute the figure. Daudpota, founding director of the Sustainable Development Networking Programme project within the United Nations Development Programme (SDNP/UNDP), wrote in 2005 that only 30 percent of the population had access to piped drinking water, while "70 percent of the population drank water of unknown quality."

There is little evidence that this has changed significantly, and arguments over water are often the source of trouble.

In June 2006, 12 people were injured in a clash between rival clans over water in Parachinar, a town in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP). The dispute started over allegations that people from the Malikhel clan had attempted to divert water to their own area.

The situation is no less strained in other parts of the country. There were scuffles at municipal water taps in Islamabad, the capital, where prior to the monsoon season people often had to wait overnight for a few precious drops.

The SDNP/UNDP and the Pakistan Meteorological Department warned in June that the country was in the grip of severe drought conditions. Zafar Iqbal, the assistant resident representative of the UNDP's crisis prevention and recovery unit, said that weather-system studies suggested below-average rainfall the previous year had placed portions of the country at “severe risk of drought”.

Early monsoon rains offered some relief in NWFP, but the shortage remains acute in desert areas of Sindh and across much of Balochistan – the country's largest province.

Balochistan, covering an area of 347,000 sq km, has faced severe periodic drought over much of the last decade, which has displaced thousands of people. Experts fear drought is returning to the province, which continues to demand a larger allocation of the national share of water – a hot political issue.

Pakistan is classified by the World Bank as a “water-stressed” nation. However, the government's economic survey for 2005-2006, regarded as the most comprehensive official analysis of the situation, reported that annual per capita water availability had dropped to 1,105 cubic metres, just above the “water-deficient” level of 1,000 cubic metres.

Photo: David Swanson/IRIN

Municipal waste is being dumped into the Neelum River in Muzaffarabad. Many rivers in Pakistan are now polluted with factory waste and sewage. However, no effective law has been implemented to protect rivers or other water resources

Water politics

The management of the country's water resources is a politically divisive issue, according to experts.

Plans to construct large, new reservoirs, particularly the Kalabagh Dam in NWFP, are opposed by all provinces except the Punjab. Politicians, environmentalists and activists in these provinces have argued the dam would exacerbate the loss of agricultural land and further reduce water flowing downstream in the Indus River, the country’s longest river, towards the Sindh coastal delta.

A significant portion of the water problems in Pakistan is also linked to growing levels of pollution. The ineffective enforcement of laws regarding the dumping of effluent, factory wastes and sewage into rivers has led to large-scale pollution of many water sources. In major cities, untreated sewage and toxic waste deposited onto open ground have increasingly contaminated water sources, causing sickness and death.

Arshad Abbasi, a visiting research fellow with the independent Islamabad-based Sustainable Policy Development Institute, which has worked extensively on issues related to water, said the government was discussing mechanical filtration of water, when natural filtration systems, such as forest cover, were best. Abbasi said the destruction of forests and other environmental degradation was a major factor in the rapidly worsening water quality.

A serious health issue

According to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an estimated 250,000 children in Pakistan die each year due to waterborne disease. Infections from water, including cholera, typhoid and dysentery, burden the public health system, with government reports stating 40 percent of hospital beds annually are taken up by people suffering from such diseases.

USAID said safe water would reduce the incidence of diarrhoea and other related diseases by up to 50 percent. It is engaged in a US $1.4 million project to test a new water-purification system in three countries, including Pakistan. Islamabad has based its planning along similar lines and pledged to set up 6,500 purification plants across the country over the next few years.

Abbasi, however, believed such plans miss the point. "Even in New York, it’s an accepted fact that there is no replacement for natural recharge areas through which water can pass,” he said.

Meanwhile, the perils posed by water remain an ever-present part of people’s lives.

"We can't wait till the government can make water safer. We need water now," said Rehmat Masih, who lives in a “katchi abadi”, or shantytown, in the Shahdra area on the outskirts of the eastern city of Lahore . Masih said families like his could not boil water, as the authorities suggested, because rising fuel costs had made it impossible to boil large amounts on a tiny kerosene stove.

For others, the cost of contaminated water is even higher.

"My infant son died last year after suffering acute diarrhoea. He was four months old. I can never forget the agony he suffered," Abida Bibi, 22, told IRIN in the Punjabi town of Gujranwala. She and her husband, Jamil, an unemployed labourer, said such tragedy was what “poor people have to live with”.

"It will be a miracle if our daughter, aged two, survives this summer. She has been sick with dysentery for two months now, and we have no money to treat her," she said.