The government is planning to establish 17 water-testing laboratories in the country under "Safe Drinking Water" programme, to check the quality of drinking water, says a news report. Officials involved in the project claim that work on 11 laboratories has already been completed, while six existing laboratories are also being upgraded.
As many as 4,301 water supply schemes have been surveyed in the country, including 2,577 in Punjab, 872 in Sindh, 665 in NWFP, 79 in Balochistan, 108 in AJK and Northern Areas. The government has, meanwhile, stepped up efforts to establish more and more water filtration plants to provide safe drinking water to the masses.
Hundreds of thousands of people have contracted such potentially lethal diseases as Hepatitis B and C aside from diarrhoea, due mainly to polluted drinking water supply. The National Drinking Water Policy, formulated in 2007, pledges supply of safe drinking water to the entire population by the year 2020 at affordable rates.
Interestingly, under the policy, people's right to water for drinking purposes precedes all other purposes, including the use of water for industrial and agricultural purposes, while Pakistan is currently spending only 0.25 percent of its GDP on water supply and sanitation. According to analysts, the country needs to increase investment in water supply projects to at least one percent of the GDP, and should also focus on tariff reform and the building of increased water treatment capacity.
According to "Asian Water Development Outlook 2007," per capita water availability in Pakistan has meanwhile decreased to an alarming extent, in the wake of five years of drought, which needs to be countered through a comprehensive strategy. Viewed in the historical perspective, our failure to develop good quality drinking water supply and sanitation systems has been a very costly mistake which, according to one estimate, has caused an aggregate annual loss of Rs 112 billion in terms of lost man-hours and the expenses incurred on treatment.
The annual expenses incurred on treatment of water-borne diseases alone come to Rs 30 billion, which has become a major burden on the economy. Inadequate and defective water supply system, poor sanitation and unhygienic practices have therefore exacted a high cost.
Unfortunately, drinking water supply and sanitation have traditionally been treated as low-priority areas in Pakistan, while, according to one estimate, the bottled water market in Pakistan has registered an annual growth of nearly 40 percent! Researchers have repeatedly pointed out that piped water in the country often gets contaminated due to leakages developed by underground pipelines, which are often laid in close proximity of leaking sewers.
This causes extremely harmful germs and bacteria to get sucked into the water supply network. According to data compiled by Pakistan Council of Research on Water Resources, as much as 50 percent of urban water supply is unfit for human consumption, while the situation in the rural hinterland is much worse.
Almost 20 to 40 percent of hospital beds in the country are occupied by patients suffering from water-borne diseases such as cholera, typhoid, dysentery and Hepatitis which are responsible for a third of all deaths in the country. As water supply in rural areas is mostly secured through hand-pumps, a major contaminant of groundwater supply is the untreated industrial effluents dumped in vacant plots and fields that seep down to the water table.
As ensuring supply of safe drinking water to the masses is too sensitive an issue to be left entirely to officials, people's elected representatives, civil society groups and local notables too should somehow be involved in the mega project.
Secondly, technicians required to run the labs should be trained under a crash programme, and the scheme should be executed with utmost diligence and dispatch. Rapid spread of water-borne diseases in the country underscores the need of fast-track and high quality implementation of this extremely important national project.