MQM, Rangers or private firm, who’ll fix KWSB?

Karachi
Opposition parties offered different suggestions to the provincial government during the provincial assembly sitting on Friday for fixing the affairs of the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board, mainly handing over its administration to them, Rangers or a private company.
Muttahida Qaumi Movement MPA Khawaja Izhar-ul-Hassan, the leader of the opposition in the House, while participating in a general debate on an adjournment motion submitted by his party’s lawmaker on the issue of the acute water crisis in Karachi, offered that his party would address the problems of the KWSB if the water utility was handed over to it for three months only.
He also suggested that the provincial governments of Punjab, Balochistan, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa should spare funds for the development of Karachi keeping in view its importance as the commercial capital of the country.
Another opposition lawmaker, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s Khurrum Sher Zaman, suggested that the KWSB should be handed over to Rangers for a month so that they could keep a check on the rampant pilferage in its system and determine as to which political quarters in the city were the ultimate beneficiaries of the constant theft of water from the distribution network.
Another PTI lawmaker, Samar Ali Khan, suggested that the KWSB should be privatised like the city’s power utility so that the former could be run purely on corporate lines.
“Under a privatised system, the KWSB will provide water only to its regularly paying consumers,” he added.
Fifteen lawmakers took part in the debate on the adjournment motion, two of them from the treasury benches.
They spoke on a plethora of problems faced by the KWSB, including overstaffing, outdated machinery, power cuts at its installations, water theft from its system, lack of supply schemes, financial woes, undue political interference and lack of support by the federal and provincial governments.
The legislators regretted that while Karachi was facing a shortage of around 450 million gallons daily (MGD), the government was delaying the launching of the K-IV greater Karachi water supply scheme for the last several years because of which the cost of the project had constantly been increasing.
Hassan said the pumping stations of the KWSB were decades’ old and millions of gallons of water was pilfered from the distribution system either through illegal connections or unauthorised water hydrants.
In one instance, he added, 100 MGD water was pumped through the system of the KWSB but only 50 MGD water had ultimately reached the consumers because of the illegal connections in main lines of the water utility.
Hassan suggested that meters should be installed at pumping stations to find out the locations from where water was being stolen and introduce measures on an emergency basis to plug the leakages in the system.
He said the absent employees of the KWSB should attend their duties regardless of their political affiliations.
Muhammad Hussain Khan, the MQM MPA who had moved the adjournment motion, said the government should immediately stop its step-motherly-like treatment towards Karachi.
“For fulfilling the water needs of Karachi, four or five new water supply schemes, having a 600 MGD additional water supply capacity, should be initiated and executed at the same time,” he suggested.
He said the new water supply schemes for Karachi should be launched in the same way the federal government had launched several power generation schemes with a 10,000 MW generation capacity keeping in view the power shortfall in the upcountry.
He noted that the Sindh government had spent Rs5 billion on the construction of the new building of the provincial assembly while an additional matching amount would be spent on new luxury hostels for MPAs.
“This massive spending only for the accommodation of lawmakers is completely unnecessary at a time when the government is not even able to deliver the basic needs of life including water to the residents of the provincial capital.”
Khan pointed out that the upcountry areas had witnessed tremendous growth in terms of development projects – the metro bus service for example – but Karachi, despite making a massive contribution towards the government’s income generation, could not even fulfill the basic needs of its residents.
Mehtab Akbar Rashdi, a Pakistan Muslim League-Functional MPA, said the persistent water crisis in Karachi had exposed the provincial government and subsidiary civic agencies including the Karachi Municipal Corporation and KWSB’s incompetency.
She added that gravity of the water crisis in Karachi could be gauged from the fact that there were no water supply pipelines in the newly developed phases of the posh area Defence and their residents had to completely rely on water tanker services.
Syed Hafeezuddin of the PTI pointed out that the additional water supply for Karachi that would be arranged through the K-IV bulk water supply scheme would be from the polluted Keenjhar Lake where the effluent produced by the industries in Kotri was dumped.
He said the Dhabeji pumping station had been functioning with old machinery and equipment which was installed in 1958. Some machinery was installed there in 1998. He said a law should be passed for punishing the people involved in water theft.
Irum Azeem Farooque of the MQM said she had pointed out sometime back that there could be water riots in the coming days instead of ones based on ethnicity or land and her prediction seemed to be coming true.
Shaharyar Khan Mahar of the PML-F said many new grand housing schemes were emerging on the city’s outskirts and the government should inform the public as to how the water needs of their residents would be met.

Local govt bill
The provincial assembly unanimously passed into law the Sindh Local Government Second Amendment Bill, 2015.
Parliamentary affairs minister Dr Sikandar Mandhro said the amendment bill was primarily aimed at giving protection to town committees, municipal committees and municipal corporations in the local government system, the notification for which was issued in 2010.
The minister added that as the population of the province had increased since 2010, it would be unwise to change back the status of town committees, municipal committees and municipal corporations already formed a few years ago.