Dysfunctional plants

Continuing its crackdown on various development criteria in Sindh, the Supreme Court’s judicial committee on water quality and drainage in Sindh reported abhorrent findings that are pertinent to every citizen of the province. The investigation uncovers that an emergency exists whereby water treatment plants and sewerage treatment plants are dysfunctional and have not been operational in most cases. The obvious conclusion is that untreated sewerage water is recycled into irrigation systems used to grow the crops we consume. Sooner or later, our generations’ genomes could be affected because the Sindh government failed to improve quality standards for water and allowed all types of industrial and other waste to penetrate our crops and produce. Although it is a pity that the highest-ranking court in the nation has to intervene to ascertain that people’s basic needs for water are met, we thank the SC for holding relevant officials responsible.

The lack of functional water treatment plants is an emergency because many people consume and bathe in the noxious water. For the sake of nursing mothers and babies, this is a matter to be urgently corrected. Access to safe water would assuage a sheer volume of problems in healthcare, some of which regularly occur at epidemic levels, such as hepatitis, via faecal-oral routes.

Evidently, the title of the Land of the Pure may be a misnomer here. We support the judicial commission’s recommendation that the Sindh Building Control Authority be restrained from issuing approval to contractors. It is baffling that inadequate changes, if any, were made for the provision of basic amenities, prior to allowing residential populations to increase multifold per square area. Before authorities consider other types of treatment set-ups like desalination plants to increase water supply, they should improve upon appropriately managing the ones they are currently responsible for and prove they are capable of purifying existing water supply.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 19^th, 2018.

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