Arsenic in water supply: Wasa MD to submit report on May 3

LHC takes suo motu notice on report that 253 of 392 tubewells contaminated.

LAHORE:

The Lahore High Court’s chief justice on Tuesday sought a report from the managing director of the Water and Sanitation Authority (Wasa) for May 3 about the alleged presence of arsenic in tubewells in the city.

The Wasa MD was supposed to submit a detailed report on Tuesday, but did not. Chief Justice Ijaz Ahmed Chaudhry passed fresh orders for the MD to finish the report by the next hearing on May 3.

Advocate Mateenul Haq, counsel of the Lahore Conservation Society, submitted that Wasa tubewells were supplying water contaminated with arsenic and its consumption was causing gastrointestinal diseases in children and kidney failure in adults.

Former chief justice Khawaja Muhammad Sharif had taken suo motu notice of the case last year and Advocates Haq and Muhammad Sohail Dar had filed similar writ petitions submitting that unclean drinking water was spreading diseases in Lahore.

The suo motu notice was taken on a news report which cited an Environment Protection Agency report that 253 of the 392 Wasa tubewells in Lahore were contaminated with arsenic.

The petitioners argued that the Punjab government gave Wasa money to provide clean drinking water to citizens but these funds had been wasted due to negligence on the part of the authorities concerned.

Earlier in reply to the petitions, Wasa said drinking water was supplied to consumers through a network of ductile iron, cast iron, asbestos cement and high density polyethylene and polyvinyl chloride pipelines that was regularly disinfected by chlorination. It said that generators had been installed on many tubewells to prevent contamination while chemists checked the quality of the water every day.



Published in The Express Tribune, April 20^th, 2011.