Access to piped water

Total water requirement of Karachi is 1,100 millions of gallons per day, but it gets less than 50% of the demand

Half of Karachi households have no access to piped water, says a recent study. It does not mention how infrequently the other half gets water in their taps. They do get monthly water bills on a regular basis. They pay the bills for fear of disconnection. And they buy water tankers or cans to meet their water needs. They have to pay to two suppliers for the same thing. This is one of the strategies for survival in Karachi where water shortage is increasing by the day. The total water requirement of Karachi is around 1,100 mgd but it gets less than 50 per cent of the demand. The city is supplied water from Keenjhar Lake and Hub dam. Keenjhar is meant to supply 550 mgd but it provides 450 mgd only. Hub is supposed to supply 100 mgd to some areas of Karachi.

“We get less than the due share of water for Karachi,” says an adviser to the Sindh government. “The request to the federal government has been pending for the past three years.” He urged the common people not to waste the precious commodity. Perhaps he forgot the fact it is the elite who waste water. He stressed that if consumers paid their bills, they would get water in their taps regularly. Here too myopia is evident.

“Decades of increasing the private sector’s role in water provision has not adequately increased access, particularly for the urban under-served,” says Diana Mitlin, lead author of the report and principal researchers for human settlement at the International Institute for Environment and Development. She rightly says water is a human right. She says water, like air, is a free good. There is, however, a group of people who assert that God made water but He did not create its delivery systems, though they have nothing to do with the scientific aspects of water supply. They only write reports for those who pay them.

Water is for the most part a governance issue, especially in Sindh. Shah Latif Bhittai, one of Sindh’s great poets, says only a fool living near a river would die of thirst.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 29^th, 2019.

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