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Wednesday July 23, 2025

‘No compromise on water issue’

March 08, 2011
LAHORE
Punjab Assembly speaker Rana Muhammad Iqbal has said that Pakistan will raise its voice at every level for its rights.
Addressing the inaugural session of International Conference on Water Resources Engineering & Management 2011 which was organized at the University of Engineering and Technology (UET, he said Pakistan had been working for peace in the world, but there would be no compromise on the solidarity of the country. He said that Pakistan would not compromise on even a single drop of water.
Rana Iqbal said that Punjab was the land of five rivers. A member of a family with agricultural background, he recalled the days when water was available in sufficient quantity and the fertile lands of Punjab not only fulfilled food requirements of the country but also enabled it to export food to other countries. Now the country has to import even the necessary food items such as sugar, edible oil, and sometimes even wheat, he regretted.
Although population growth was a major cause behind this, he observed, water shortage was the second major reason for the scarcity of the food items. He urged water experts to play an important role to come up with sustainable, technically feasible, economically viable and environment friendly solutions to the major issues of water.
He said that the conference would prove a step forward in reducing the miseries of the people. He asked the organizers of the conference to submit him the recommendations of the conference so that he could forward them to the provincial and federal government, to help them reach appropriate decisions in this regard.
He said that the city had been famous for its gardens and educational institutions of high caliber that produced Allama Dr. Muhammad Iqbal, Dr. Abdul Salam, the Nobel Laureate and many other renowned personalities.