Provide Pakistanis with safe drinking water

Providing safe drinking water to all citizens, along with basic health and education, are among the most basic responsibilities of any responsive government. However, providing good quality water to households that cannot afford their own filtration systems, or who cannot buy water from private companies, remains a difficult task for many ‘less developed’ countries, including Pakistan.

Population pressure and climate-related stress are exacerbating water stress, particularly for poorer and marginalized communities, which make up a large portion of the global population. This water stress is evident in many megacities in the global south, including South Asia. Consider, for example, how a developing city like Karachi, with an estimated population of over 16 million, cannot adequately meet the water needs of about half of its population.

This dismal situation persists, even though the Pakistani government’s own Vision 2025 recognises that access to water is a fundamental right. However, many urban slums and rural areas are completely unconnected to water and sanitation facilities. Open defecation is a major problem, which in turn contaminates local water bodies and exacerbates waterborne diseases.

Pakistan’s National Water Policy, formulated in 2018, recognized the need to ensure that all citizens have access to water. Yet, the state has shirked its responsibility to invest in the infrastructure needed to ensure uniform access to clean water for homes in urban and rural areas. The lack of maintenance of existing water infrastructure results in frequent mixing of water and sewage, causing tens of thousands of deaths every year.

It is common for households of different income levels to purchase water from private suppliers in a large city like Karachi. Successive governments that have ruled Karachi have failed to do much about the loss of almost a third of the water supply through theft or leakage, leading to the dominance of the ‘tanker mafia’. The inequalities in access to piped water further exacerbate existing socio-economic inequalities. In Karachi alone, low-income households spend 10-20% of their monthly income on obtaining water from alternative, non-piped sources.

Many other major cities in all four provinces urgently need to improve their piped water systems. Years of indifference and neglect have left all water management entities in a precarious financial situation. These inefficient entities rely heavily on provincial subsidies to cover operational costs. Such weak water management governance hampers efforts to improve water supply and water infrastructure.

Researchers recently published a robust analysis of the existing tariff structure and water management system of the Karachi Water & Sewerage Corporation in Water Policy, a specialized international journal. This article aptly highlights how KWSC’s policies are not fair and efficient, resulting in multiple inequalities in access. KWSC provides water that is 10 to 100 times cheaper than water delivered by tankers. However, poorer households have very limited or no access to piped water connections. In addition to poor bill collection, this limited distribution of KWSC’s services prevents it from generating sufficient revenue to improve the quality of its services.

It is high time that our policy and decision makers pay attention to improving the accessibility of essential water services. In addition to allocating sufficient resources to the development of water infrastructure and upgrading of existing water supply systems, entities responsible for water supply in all parts of the country must be reformed to become more responsive and self-sufficient. Additional funding will still be needed to implement community-specific water quality improvement measures such as rainwater harvesting, especially in areas prone to pollution or where surrounding water sources are inadequate.

In addition to ensuring good quality water for all citizens, urgent measures are also needed to enable water conservation. Otherwise, pollution and overuse will further undermine the already overburdened freshwater resources to which all citizens, rich and poor, have an equal right.