Abbottabad city dwellers face water shortage

ABBOTTABAD: The Public Health Engineering Department (PHED) and Tehsil Municipal Administration (TMA) have failed to provide clean drinking water to the residents of Kehal, Malikpura and Kunj in Abbottabad city, where the residents have been facing acute shortage of drinking water for the last few days.
Despite having Japanese government-funded gravity-flow drinking water supply scheme, water crisis in the city still persists particularly during the rainy days. The residents of Kehal, Kunj and Malikpura have been raising hue and cry, but none of the authorities have been able to resolve their issue. The gravity flow project is aimed at addressing the shortage of water and improving the water services in the city and its surrounding area, but ironically it provides filthy and muddy water to the people and the management has to stop water supply to the residents.
According to sanitation staff, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government is spending huge funds on the provision of clean drinking water to the resident of Abbottabad city. They said the government had released more than Rs40 million for the improvement of water supply scheme, but all funds were reportedly wasted due to ill-planning.
Huge funds have been spent on laying new water pipes, but nothing has been done to repair the faulty tube-wells in the city. The water distribution is the responsibility of the local municipality as it collects taxes from the residents while Public Health Department was assigned to complete the project.
It was learnt that both the departments were shifting the responsibility onto each other. No mechanism has been made to form the water board to look after the water problems of the city. In the past, the Municipal Committee provided water to city through tube-wells and now 21 tube-wells are dysfunctional that has further aggravated the situation. The attention of the local MPA Mushtaq Ahmed Ghani, who is minister for information, was invited time and again, but he seems to be helpless to solve the problem.