Sepa to prosecute municipal bodies for ‘massive pollution’

Karachi

The Sindh Environmental Protection Agency (Sepa) has decided that the local government agencies in the province, including the Karachi Municipal Corporation, district municipal corporations and Karachi Water & Sewerage Board, will be prosecuted in environmental tribunals for their unchecked practices and having become the biggest cause of air and water pollution, especially in Karachi.

Sepa Director General Naeem Ahmed Mughal told the audience of a conference on Wednesday that in future the local government agencies would face prosecution as a matter of policy and no agency would be given exemption from action for causing air and water pollution.

He said cases against other public, private and industrial institutions in the province were referred to environmental tribunals for their unsafe practices causing damage to the environment.

The conference titled “Making our cities sustainable” was organised by the National Forum for Environment and Health in connection with its 13th Annual Environmental Excellence Awards.  Transport Minister Syed Nasir Hussain Shah was the chief guest, who gave away awards to 56 companies and organisations for adopting good practices for the betterment of the environment.

Mughal said that merely issuing warnings and show-cause notices to local government agencies would no more provide a workable solution nor would it prevent practices of municipal bodies causing air and water pollution on a massive scale.

He said that owing to unchecked practices of municipal agencies, 450 million gallons of untreated waste water was being released into the Arabian Sea, while air pollution had been rapidly increasing due t the absence of any solid and municipal waste management system as district municipal corporations were engaged in the burning of domestic waste instead of its safe disposal.

He expressed the hope that with the elected leadership taking charge of these municipal agencies across the province, proper strategies would be adopted by the local bodies for the disposal of domestic and solid waste and the treatment of sewerage water before releasing it into the sea.

The Sepa director general said that the S-III plan to treat sewerage water produced in Karachi had been readied, while all industrial zones in the city would adopt a system of combined effluent treatment plants to lessen the instances of marine pollution.

He also lamented the constant discharge of industrial waste into freshwater bodies in the rest of Sindh, which, he said, caused a serious risk to human health.

The Sepa chief quoted a credible study by an international body, which estimated that Pakistan had been suffering Rs365 billion annual losses due to constant environmental degradation. He noted that the public health sector accounted for having the biggest share in causing a colossal loss of Rs1 billion every day to the government exchequer.

Ijaz Ahmed Khilji, an expert of mass transport systems, said 42 percent of Karachi’s population had been dependent on the public transport system, but it was unfortunate that passenger buses and other public carriers accounted for only 4.5 percent of the total number of motor vehicles in the city, creating a situation of serious stress on passenger vehicles plying in Karachi.

He said the only solution to such a sorry state of affairs related to the heavy volume of vehicular traffic could be reached through the building the mass transit system and the most feasible option to this effect was the revival of the Karachi Circular Railway (KCR), which, along with the proposed Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS), would massively facilitate commuters in the city.

Khilji said the KCR had the advantage that right of way on land reserved for the project was available to the government along with a single-line railway track on which earlier an intra-city local train service was used to ply.

He said the KCR would be built on a dual-track railway line of a total of 43 Kilometres as in its peak days 104 trains had been used to ply under the KCR service in a single day during its peak period when the population of Karachi was not more than a few million.

Secretary for Environment and Climate Change Mir Aijaz Hussain Talpur said Sindh had been actively pleading its case that 220 megawatts generated by it through an alternative source of energy on the land of the Jhimpir wind corridor should be evacuated on a preferential basis through transmission lines giving connectivity to the national power grid instead of waiting for the completion of a solar power project in southern Punjab.

He said the evacuation of electricity generated through wind power for its transmission till the national grid was one of the points raised by the Sindh chief minister when he had met the previous day with the federal water and power minister in Islamabad on energy issues concerning the province.

In his concluding remarks, Transport Minister Nasir Hussain Shah said the present Sindh government of the Pakistan Peoples Party was fully committed to resolving public transportation problems of Karachi, for which BRTS service was being constructed.

He said that in the coming few days, he would fly to China for signing there the MoU for building Yellow Line as another component of the BRTS.

The minister claimed that the government on its part had completed all the pre-requisites and formalities for the revival of the KCR in Karachi and now it was up to JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency) to make progress for building the circular railway service.

He said PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari had directed the authorities to give another chance to JICA to make progress towards the revival of the KCR and otherwise the government should go for the option of availing the services of a renowned Chinese firm to build the circular railway service.

He said the government was fully committed to the cause of environment mitigation and for this reason the scope of the environment department had been expanded to include the subject of climate change. The CM himself was holding the additional portfolio of environment department, he added.