mitigate the city’s water woes to a certain extent.
Rabia Tabassum of the National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences in her presentation, “Estimation of water demand for commercial units in Karachi”, said of the city’s total water usage, five percent was used for commercial purposes - office buildings, hotels, restaurants and other non-industrial commercial facilities.
As per a research carried out with specific focus on restaurants, a single employee was reported to consume 10 litres of water per day, making the per unit demand stand at 0.144 litres per square foot.
The mean total consumption of water for commercial purposes was calculated to be 47 litres a day that included usage for drinking, cleaning, washroom, etc.
Tabassum’s research further showed that restaurants had the largest consumption of water in the commercial sector.
Dr Rasool Baksh Mahar, a professor at the US-Pakistan Centre for Advanced Studies in Water at the Mehran University, presented the most appreciated research of the session that focused on meeting a mega city’s water demands through using recycled greywater generated by mosques through ablution. The research’s focus was Hyderabad.
Taking into account around 32 mosques of Hyderabad, the study suggested that 7.4 litres of water were used by a single person while performing ablution. The selections were based on the size, location and attendance at a mosque.
The statistics gathered over a year’s period showed that water authorities could save around 2,200 cubic metres of water daily if they were to form a strategy to conserve greywater.
“The water, easily treatable through sedimentation and disinfectants, can be used for flushing waste effluents in washrooms, gardening as well as cleaning.”
In his presentation, “Water pricing to promote equity, efficiency and sustainability in Faisalabad”, Usman Mirza, an associate coordinator of LEAD Pakistan’s water programme, stressed the need for effective water pricing strategies to evaluate the quantity of water used up by a single household.
His estimates drawn from calculating the amount of water used for drinking purposes in urban localities by 1,200 households suggest that lower income households are willing to pay more money - up to Rs3 - for a single unit of water.
Further elaborating on water pricing structures, he cited the Water and Sanitation Agency’s example which had the lowest rate of recovery, between 30 and 35 percent, of the amount it spent on providing water.
To top that, it charged 4.25 times lower than the ongoing market price. “Contrary to the widely held belief, lower tariffs on water affect the poor more than an efficient pricing structure.”