Another hollow promise: Drinking water policy yet to be implemented

Nearly seven years ago, keeping in mind the province’s populace’s lack of access to potable water, the Sindh government passed an ambitious policy under which provision of clean drinking was to be ensured but the policy remains stuck in limbo to date.

The Sindh Drinking Water Policy, which was introduced in May of 2017, envisioned reducing the morbidity and mortality caused by waterborne diseases by providing safe and uncontaminated water to the people of the province.

Moreover, the policy aimed to ensure equitable access to potable water and in this regard the provincial government was to remove the existing disparities in the coverage of safe drinking water.

Arif Jabbar Khan, who is the Country Director for an organisation working to increase access to potable water, believes that it is unlikely that the policy’s implementation will see the light of day.

“Apart from Sindh’s policy, we have a national drinking water policy as well, which has not been implemented in letter and spirit either,” he informed.

Khan said that it was unfortunate that neither the Sindh nor the national level policy had been implemented because 80 per cent of the country’s population is deprived of potable water and are compelled to drink contaminated water to quench their thirst.

When asked to elaborate on the leading cause of water contamination in the country, Khan replied: “The main source of contamination is sewerage which is extensively discharged into our drinking water.

Other sources of contamination include industrial effluents, pesticides, and fertiliser, which are dumped into our water supply.” It is pertinent to mention that the Sindh Drinking Water Policy suggests using technology and cost effective sanitation techniques to remove the contaminants that Khan mentioned.

Furthermore, the policy also promised that the government would launch a mass awareness campaign about waterborne and water related diseases, nutrition and hygiene, and water treatment and storage.

“All of these promises were meant to be broken.

Whatever laws and policies the Sindh government introduces only exist on paper, there is no actual implementation,” said Haleem Adil Shaikh, Leader of the Opposition in Sindh Assembly.

“Apart from the policy, Pakistan’s Constitution guarantees safe drinking water as a fundamental right, but the ruling party and bureaucrats are busy minting money, so they do not care if Sindh’s populace does not have potable water.” When quizzed about the lack of implementation of the water policy, Syed Nasir Hussain Shah, Minister for Local Governments, said that the provincial government was working on the water sector as a matter of priority.

When the Express Tribune pointed out that it had been 7 years since the introduction of the policy and none of its promises had been fulfilled, Shah replied: “After we launched the policy, we allocated around Rs 11 billion for different water related schemes.

In fact, we spend billions of rupees on water and sanitation every year but the floods have ravaged almost all of the infrastructure we spent on.”