[Bottled] Water Woes

In a society where the health or well-being of ordinary people comes only as an afterthought, it is no surprise that the basic of all necessities, drinking water, poses a grave risk to consumers. This reality was highlighted by the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR) in its quarterly report.

 

According to it, 12 out of 77 brands of bottled/mineral water available in the market are unsafe for human consumption. It found that arsenic and sodium levels in all these 12 brands were considerably higher than the prescribed limit, which could ultimately lead to serious illnesses to those who drank it.

The PCRWR report comes only weeks after the organisation stated that only 21 percent of water samples it collected from rural Punjab and 28 percent from rural Sindh are suitable for drinking. The dismal percentage of safe water becomes more pronounced in the remaining two provinces. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, only 7 percent of water samples and in Balochistan, only 0.3 percent samples were found to be at par with PSQCA water quality standards. Overall, 35 percent of the population has absolutely no access to safe drinking water.

In Pakistan, the primary source of water for people comes from ground, which is obtained via suction motors and hand-pumps. But unregulated urbanisation and industrialisation have led to the contamination of this water. Additionally, unchecked waste disposal system of the country's industrial sector has exacerbated the situation. Hazardous waste from factories flows freely into canals and rivers and some of it is absorbed in the ground.

Water-borne diseases arising out of drinking this contaminated water cost the country roughly 1.2 billion rupees each year. The human cost is much higher. According to some estimates, 60 percent of infant deaths in Pakistan are due to the diseases borne out of drinking unsafe water. This staggering figure is an acute reminder of the failure of our successive governments to provide even safe drinking water to its people.

The present government formulated Pakistan's first-ever National Drinking Water Policy in 2009. The aim of this policy was to provide safe drinking water to the entire population by 2020. It should be noted at this point that under Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), Pakistan has pledged to provide 93 percent of the population sustained access to clean drinking water by 2015. Under the National Drinking Water Policy, the plan is to improve the existing water supply system and establish new ones in areas where there is none yet. However, almost two years later, the achievements made under this policy are too negligible for it to be considered even remotely successful. The policy has also come under severe criticism for focusing too much on tariffs and privatisation.

Before the formulation of this national policy, the Musharraf government also tried to tackle the issue of safe drinking water. In 2004, Clean Drinking Water for All (CDWA) project was launched with an estimated 7 billion rupees price tag. Today, seven years later, the project is in disarray as it has fallen victim to politics and power struggle between the federal and provincial governments. The target of setting up 6,638 water filtration plants has been a massive failure. Only 1,173 plants have been set up, out of which 467 are not in operational condition. Last year, the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) started investigating alleged corruption of Rs 700 million in the implementation of the CDWA project. To make matters worse and demonstrate the stunning failure of this project, the revised estimate of this project now stands at a whopping 23 billion rupees.

It is now time for our government to realise that merely drafting policies is not going to solve this problem. There is a dire need for the presence of an effective check-and-balance system for accountability of the industrial and agriculture sectors and audit of the public's money, which is supposedly spent in government projects.

The government has an opportunity to show its sincerity towards resolving this matter by making an example out of these 12 brands selling unsafe water, by meting out severe penalties and bringing criminal charges against them. The fact that the companies behind these 12 brands would put innocent peoples' lives at risk for their unbridled greed is despicable. Moreover, the authorities who allowed these brands to be sold to unsuspecting consumers without ensuring quality standards must also be held responsible for their negligence. Without such follow-up mechanisms of accountability in place, the majority of this country will continue to be deprived of their fundamental right.

Published in Business Recorder (7 August 2011).