Water scarcity hits Karachi

As inevitably as day is followed by night, every summer brings an acute water shortage for residents of Pakistan's biggest and surely the most developed city. As the population of Karachi increases by leaps and bounds, thanks to an unabated migration from hinterland as well as the high birth rate - the basic necessities of life, including water and electricity are becoming scarcer.

Last week the anger, bitterness and frustration over the acute water shortage led to public rioting in several neighborhoods, including Lyari where hundreds of men, women and children pelted stones and blocked roads through burning tiers.

"In the localities of the rich, people give water to their lawns and wash their cars," Soghran Bibi, a middle-aged resident of Lyari said. "But in my house I have not received water for the last four days. Shouldn't I burn tyres and throw stones?"

And it is not just Lyari where the people are bubbling with rage. Be it North Nazimabad or Gulshan-e-Iqbal or the so-called affluent areas of Clifton and Defence the taps are running dry. While the people of Defence and Clifton survive the shortage with the help of an efficient home delivery system in which water trucks go home to home once or twice a week, residents of many shortage hit localities have nothing but to curse the water authorities and struggle for one or two buckets of water. No wonder the pressure of living in this teeming city, where from public transport to the supply of water and power is in shambles, is making us more bad tempered, bitter and angry even with ourselves.

Authorities blame the nature – the scarcity of rain – for the dearth of water. They argue that city‚s exploding population has outpaced the infrastructure and all the development programs. A sleepy coastal city of around 350,000 people in 1947 turned into a mega-polis because one wave of immigrants followed another since then.

But independent experts say the city first needs water management more than an extra-water supply to plug the gap between the demand and supply. Arif Hasan, a noted town planner and architect, estimates that 150 million gallons of water per day could be made available and added to the requirements of the water-starved Karachi if authorities succeeds in plugging leakages.

The priority at present is not to lay more pipelines, but to augment water supply, he was quoted as saying by Daily Times, a new English-language daily, from Karachi. But authorities are more concerned on arranging more supplies from the main source of Indus River, which already provides 550mgd to Karachi.

Experts say majority of the water pipelines in Karachi are rotten. They just not waste 30 to 40 percent water, but also a health hazard at in many places sewerage water seeps into them. But be it the military-led government or the democrats from the Pakistan People's Party to the Muttahida Qaumi Movement to the Jamaat-e-Islami run city government they have failed to take up the issue as water crisis deepens with the passage of every year.

With the Indus getting less and less water every year because of the water storages upstream, Kara-chiites are bracing for more water shortages despite the early onset of the monsoon.