As many as 2.2 million people across the world die due to water related diseases, most of them are children under the age of five, while 1.1 billion people in the world still lack access to improved water supply and more than 2.6 billion people to improved sanitation, said Indonesian Ambassador to Pakistan Ishak Latuconsina on Tuesday.
He was addressing the inaugural session of a seminar organised by UAF Water Management Research Centre as chief guest here. He said contaminated drinking water is a major cause of illness and human health is severely affected by water-related diseases as well as by chemical pollution discharged into the water.
Ishak assured full co-operation from his mission for exchange of information and sharing of experiences in water management from Indonesia "We need to work together and harder to turn words into deeds to bring measurable difference in our people's lives," he added.
Earlier, UAF VC Professor Dr Iqrar Ahmad Kham said that UAF for broaden its role as a community builder, would provide an environment of interactive learning, knowledge and experience sharing, questioning, discussions, feedback and social interaction among all stakeholders such as, teachers, researchers, farmers, industrialists, entrepreneurs, students etc.
He said that UAF and Bogar University Indonesia are going to jointly hold a bilateral conference in mid May at UAF. Dr Ahmad termed the seminar a wake up call to sensitise the masses about the emerging challenges of water scarcity and quality. He revealed that per capita water availability declined from 5600 cubic meter in 1950 to 1300 cubic meter in 2010.
Professor Dr Zulfiqar Ahmad Chairman Dept. of Earth Sciences, Quaid-e-Azam University Islamabad in his keynote address asked for collective efforts for promoting awareness to arrest the water wastage in drinking, domestic use and irrigation by adopting best water management strategies.
He pointed out that with each passing day the water is becoming scare and Pakistan is being counted in a danger zone. He said in some areas of the country people forced to migrate to other places due to non-availability of fresh water for human and animals. Dr Zulfiqar highlighted the factors of water scarcity and quality and said that low rain, soil erosion, population growth were the major players of the crises.
Professor Dr Rai Niaz Ahmad, Dean, Faculty of Agri. Engineering & Technology said that the good water quality is a basic need of healthy world and a healthy country. He said that poor quality contributes each year 4 billion cases of diarrhea. He informed the technical session of the seminar would be held on March 24th with Engineer Shamsul Mulk as chief guest. Later the visiting ambassador inspected the agri exhibition and flower show. He took keen interest in the exhibition.
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