CDA must be held accountable for its negligence and breaches in city’s water and sewerage system be fixed immediately.
ISLAMABAD: I still can’t believe that something like this could ever be allowed to happen. My mother turned on the tap one morning and out came the filthiest, foulest smelling water you can imagine. I’ll just say it: sewage was coming out our taps, in our kitchen, in our showers, in our laundry. In a panic mode, we immediately shut off the water supply and had our tanks emptied and cleaned (a process that took several hours), and started pumping groundwater from our well.
In this muddy but ostensibly cleaner water, we washed ourselves, our clothes, our dishes. I can’t even begin to describe our horror and disgust when we thought about how much sewage we may have been exposed to up to that point. I was concerned not just for my family, but also for our eight-month-pregnant housekeeper and her three young children — who had been filtering this ‘water’ to drink.
We frantically tried to reach the Capital Development Authority (CDA). According to their website, “the residents of the Federal Capital can now lodge their complaints related to environment, sanitation, sewerage, drainage, civil works, roads, footpaths, parks, water supply, street lights and encroachments with the focal persons of their area. The step is aimed at processing the complaints of the Islamabad residents on a fast track basis by decreasing the cumbersome processes involved in lodging complaints with various directorates of the CDA.” The list on the website said that the focal person for our sector was the Director of Urban Planning and provided his office and cell numbers. We called the focal person’s office but he wasn’t in; we tried his cellphone but it was off; we called his office again, several times, but he was never in; his PA told us the cell number on the website was incorrect and gave us a new number; this new cell number was not responding either. The PA told us it was not the focal person’s job to receive our water-related complaint anyway. Somebody ought to tell this ‘focal person’ and his PA that the CDA website clearly says otherwise. Calls to neighbours revealed that the problem had been observed in some houses in our street several days earlier, and these neighbours had done the same thing we did — shut off the public water supply and reached into the ground behind their homes. No one had been able to get hold of the CDA.
After days of unanswered calls and getting redirected again and again to more numbers that wouldn’t answer our calls — one gentleman even started shouted at us for calling him on a Saturday — my father started sending lengthy text messages describing our problem and our difficulty in getting any help from the CDA to our focal person, as well as to the Director of Water Management and his deputy. This beginning of a ‘paper trail’ got someone’s attention at last. For the past three days now, the CDA has been sending a water tanker and some men to clean our pipes. They say that there is a breach in the pipes “somewhere” that has mixed sewage into our neighbourhood’s water supply. No one appears to be anywhere near identifying where this breach is or how to fix it. It has been two weeks since the problem began.
The sustained negligence by the CDA in this matter is an atrocity, a moral horror; this is the kind of performance that should topple governments. Access to clean water is one of the most basic human right — but the capital city of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is pumping sewage to its residents and expects them to make do while it tears up roads for shiny new Metro Buses.
The incompetence and indifference of the CDA has exposed my family, and so many other families, to a host of potentially fatal diseases. But will there be accountability? It happened in my relatively affluent F-11 neighbourhood now, but it has been an ongoing crime in other parts of the city for ages. We do not deserve this. No human being deserves this. Shame on you, CDA, for failing this city again and again. We demand that the CDA be held accountable for the quality of its basic services, and that these outrageous, unacceptable breaches in the city’s water and sewerage system be fixed immediately.
Fatima Shakeel
Published in The Express Tribune, July 14th, 2014.
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