Water scarcity: Hyderabad faces water, power crises

HYDERABAD:

As the public utility companies slogged it out over their financial issues, the citizens of Hyderabad faced acute water scarcity which continued for between 12 and 36 hours in different areas as electricity connections to water supply plants were severed.

The four talukas of Hyderabad are supplied between 40 and 45 million gallons per day (MGD).

Hyderabad Electric Supply Company (Hesco) by Friday evening began cutting off power supply to the installations of Water and Sanitation Agency (Wasa) and town municipal administrations. The move, initiated on the directions of the federal ministry for water and power, was a part of a wide-ranging recovery drive carried out in all the 12 districts, under Hesco’s region. The company, according to its spokesman Sadiq Qubar, aims to recover over Rs6.73 billion from its private consumers and Rs17 billion from the Sindh government.

“We had asked Wasa to clear arrears of the last two months but it did not,” Kubar told The Express Tribune. WASA had to pay Rs20.8 million in July and August utility bills for its four water filtration plants.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 26^th,  2011.