Ravi Redux

The River Ravi case is an example of how civil society can move the state and government to hear its concerns.

The rights to access to clean drinking water and to a clean and healthy environment are fundamental rights vested in every Pakistani. They are rights that can be enforced against the state institution established to protect them.

Today, Pakistanis are facing a water quality crisis. The Pakistan Council on Research in Water Resources, in a 2007 report, found that every major city in Pakistan was providing unsafe drinking water to people. According to UNICEF, 20 to 40 per cent of Pakistani hospitals are occupied by patients suffering from water-related disease.

The consequence of this crisis will be difficult to bear. Over and above the thousands of lives lost just because of impure water, there is an immense burden on the state, which has to construct hospitals, educate doctors and subsidise medicine.

Yet, there is little knowledge or awareness of how water affects our everyday life. Every year, I ask my students whether they are familiar with the reaches of property law — mortgages, leases and the like — and find they are universally well-conversant with principles they have never had the chance to actually apply in their lives. When I ask them to describe the right they have to water — something none can live without — I face stony silence. At some time and at some place, we seem to have become disconnected to the natural environment in which we live and without which we cannot survive.

Last year, environment law students at the Lahore University of Management Sciences researched and prepared a writ petition regarding the pollution in the River Ravi. The Ravi is the most polluted river in Pakistan, responsible for nearly half the pollution load in the River Indus and its tributaries. And Lahore, which does not have a single waste treatment plant, is the River Ravi’s greatest polluter: the city and its nearly 10 million residents discharge all of their municipal and industrial effluent into the River Ravi — untreated!

Two civil society organisations, the Public Interest Litigation Association of Pakistan and the Lahore Conservation Society, took the case prepared by the LUMS students and filed a petition before the newly constituted Green Bench of the Lahore High Court. The petition was the first case filed before the Green Bench and the Court immediately took notice of the issue and ordered the constitution of a River Ravi Commission for the purposes of finding a sustainable roadmap to restore the natural ecology of the River Ravi.

The Commission comprises important stakeholders in the waste-treatment of the city: the secretary, the Environment Protection Department, the Advocate General, Punjab, the commissioner, Lahore, the MD, WASA, the MD, NESPAK, the president of the Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry, as well as experts from the private sector such as DG, WWF-Pakistan, Mr Vaqar Zakriya and Mr Kamil Khan Mumtaz. The commission is chaired by Dr Kausar Abdullah Malik, formerly of the Planning Commission and has increased its strength to 12 by inducting the secretary, irrigation department as a member.

After several meetings spanning four months, the commission recommended, as a first phase, the treatment of 10 cusecs of wastewater using bioremediation and constructed wetlands (rather than the consultant recommended waste stabilisation ponds) at a location near the River Ravi at Babu Sabu. The wetlands would be a first for Pakistan and an opportunity to show Lahoris that home-grown sustainable solutions to their most pressing of problems — waste treatment and access to clean water — are at their doorstep.

The Lahore High Court, in an order that has set a new precedent in public interest environment litigation, ordered the commission to publicise its recommendation and hold a public hearing in the interests of “participatory justice”. Some 40 people attended the public hearing — nowhere near enough for an issue as important as this — but gave constructive input and advice on how the recommendations could be improved. The commission has now been ordered by the court to meet with the chairman of the Planning and Development Department of the government of Punjab in order to coordinate its efforts with the larger efforts of the government to set up waste-treatment facilities in Lahore.

The Ravi case and Ravi Commission are examples of how civil society, cognisant and jealously protective of its rights, can move the state and government to hear its concerns. It is measure of the success of the Ravi case and an example of the eagerness of the government to tend to its responsibilities that the highest levels of government are now strained to think about the pollution in the Ravi. But the success of such initiatives, in the end, depends on society itself. Without public ownership of civil society initiatives, like an untended garden, they are destined to wilt.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 3^rd, 2013.