Shamozai villagers protest faulty water scheme

MARDAN: The residents of Shamozai village in Katlang Tehsil, Mardan district, staged a protest demonstration against the Public Health Engineering Department for allegedly stopping drinking water from an old tubewell in the village and launching a newly built water supply scheme that is not fulfilling the local community’s water needs.

The villagers demanded Chief Secretary Shahab Ali Shah and Commissioner Mardan Nisar Ahmad to take note of their suffering and order an investigation as to why the millions of rupees were spent on a third tubewell in Shamozai village, where there were already two in the village.

Villagers said they had been demanding from the Public Health Engineering Department for a few years to upgrade the power capacity of the electric motor installed in the tubewell so the water could be supplied to the main water storage tank, supplied to village residents in pipes.

“The village population was earlier dependent on an old natural well, where the water was stored for use. Due to a host of reasons, the water lost its quality and was no longer considered safe for drinking.

The Public Health Department then dug another tubewell outside the village and rather than supplying water to the main water storage tank, they installed an under-power motor to the tubewell and pumped water into the old dirty well and then again used another power motor to pump the water into the water tank,” Shamsher Khan, a village committee leader, complained while speaking to protesters.

He said that rather than solving their simple problem by upgrading the capacity of the motor, the department spent millions of funds and dug a third tube-well and that too outside the village. “Now, the officials of the department have stopped water supply from the old scheme and inaugurated it recently to prove that the water issue has been resolved, which is not true.

They have repeated the same blunder by installing a motor of low power even on the third tube-well, and water is again supplied to the old open well and then supplied to the main water storage tank,” the village elder said. Shamsher Khan said the government was wasting resources by operating three tube-wells, but the water supply problem of the village persisted.

He said the department recently inaugurated the third tube well and stopped water supply from the second one, which created serious water shortages in the village. “We are poor people and can’t convey our complaints to the government. We will demand the chief secretary and Mardan commissioner to kindly take note of our problems and order an investigation into the matter as to why the third tube well was established that didn’t resolve the water issue,” he said.

Shamozai village is located in Katlang Tehsil, north of Mardan, where drinking water has been a longstanding issue for its residents. Since it is a mountainous terrain and the natural well is located in the middle of the village, therefore, the sewage water disappears into the ground and is mixed with the water in the well.

Also, the water supply to the well is dependent on rainfall on the mountains. In summer, particularly in dry spells, the water level drops, forcing the residents to fetch water from nearby villages. In the past few decades, the residents have repeatedly asked their elected representatives and the relevant government officials to solve this issue, but to no avail.

The villagers have been asking the public health department to replace the 20-horsepower motor with a 35 or 40-horsepower motor so that the clean water from the new tube-well could be supplied directly to the water tank and piped to the households.

According to a retired officer of the Pakistan Air Force, Niaz Mohammad Khan, the villagers are still drinking water from the same dirty well, while the negligence of the Public Health Department is causing extra expenses to the national exchequer, as water is first supplied to the natural well through pipes and then again to the water tank.