Call for making KWSB an autonomous and transparent body

Karachi
The main reason for the water crisis in town is that the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board (KWSB) is a non-professional, highly politicized body with hardly a reservoir of professional skill. It needs to be an autonomous body with total transparency in its operations.
These views were expressed by Tasneem Siddiqui, former bureaucrat and currently a leading social activist, at a panel discussion and airing of their water woes by citizens, titled, “Water issue in Karachi”, on Thursday evening. The event was organised by Shehri-Citizens for a Better Environment at a local hotel.
Siddiqui lamented the lack of the metering system, or at most a very tardy metering, which he said resulted in leakage of revenues. He said once this shortcoming was plugged, revenue leakage would stop and the body would be able to resort to balancing, modernisation and replacement (BMR) to revamp its generation system and provide water to the citizens unhindered, something that was the public’s basic right.
It would help in recoveries which, in turn, would generate funds for refurbishing the water supply system, he added. Siddiqui said that 417 million gallons daily (mgd) was earmarked to reach the citizens of which only 30 percent was reaching them. So it had to be detected as to where the rest of the water was.
He alleged that water was reaching the tankers which in turn were selling it. He said 60 percent of the city’s population were in the Rs15,000/month income bracket. They could hardly afford tanker water and warned that if allowed to continue unchecked, the situation could lead to crippling water riots.
The water utility, he said, was suffering an annual loss of Rs49 billion, and bills were not reaching the consumers; hence, the leakage. Siddiqui said every town must have its own distribution system and all towns must have a metering system. This, he said, could make the board a self-financing institution within two years.
As regards the oft-advanced proposal to privatise the utility, Prof Noman of the NED University of Engineering and Technology said that if water were to be treated as an essential service, it must never be handed over to the private sector.
Syed Hafeezuddin, PTI MPA, was deadly against handing over the utility to the private sector. Sixty-eight percent of the money, he alleged, was going into bribery.
Urban planner Farhan Anwar said that the larger problem the people were faced with was organisational reforms. He said the KWSB was faced with systemic issues. “We have to connect the dots to determine as to why the concerned organisations have been bankrupt all these years.”
A member of the provincial assembly belonging to the MQM, Syed Khalid Ahmed, said the city was receiving a quantum of 550mgd as against a requirement of 1,100mgd.
He said there were pumping stations at Dhabeji and Gharo but they were worn out, antique and inefficient. Besides, the open canals, conduits, and siphons that were supposed to send water to the town were brazenly being used for cultivation, cattle farming and supplying water to the farmhouses of the rich en route right under the nose of the authorities concerned, he said.
Ahmed also accused the “hydrant mafia” of choking the water supply to the consumers. Water pilferage, he said, must be made a non-bailable offence. He also suggested telemetering in the case of water supply.
A representative of the Water Tankers Association asserted that in Karachi there was no tanker mafia, and there only was the “hydrant mafia”. Normally, he said, tankers had to wait at hydrants for three days at a stretch to be filled while those meant to be carrying water for the VIPs, for the industrial establishments, or political parties’ heads were filled right away.
He said not an extra drop of water had been added to the system after 2006, while the population had burgeoned in the meantime, increasing by almost 900,000 annually.
Winding up, Amber Alibhai of Shehri said laws and by-laws of the organisation would have to be revised and remodeled to meet the current exigencies of the situation.
There, she said, would have to be a regulatory body to oversee and streamline the working of the organisation. The speeches were followed y a heated question-answer session where citizens came up with a plethora of complaints against the KWSB.