“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 29th, 2019.
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