Major water supply project for Karachi delayed

KARACHI: A major water supply project for the metropolitan city K-IV has been delayed and there is no chance for Karachiites to have sufficient quantity of water in the coming two-three years. According to the official documents, the completion of the first phase of the ‘Fourth Additional Water Supply Project’ has been delayed till 2023. The Ministry of Water and Power has sent the timeline of the project to the Ministry of Planning and Special Initiatives and after three months of approval of Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (ECNEC), a consultant would be appointed by April this year (2021). The consultant will submit the project design, PC-I, and bidding documents by July 2021 and work on the K-IV project is likely to start by November 2021. The official documents further suggested that Wapda has to complete the civil work of the project in 20 months, by July 2023. The said major water supply project K-IV has already been delayed for about 18 years and the civil work of the project has also been stalled since August 2018. According to official estimates, completion of the first phase will provide Karachi with an additional 260 million gallons of water per day. Initiated in 2007, according to the initial project report, the said K-IV water project was expected to be completed by 2018, it would spread across 120 kanals and a network of pipelines. However, the project is being delayed for the last many years due to multiple reasons. In July 2016, the KWSB had assigned the construction work for phase one of K-IV to the Frontier Works Organisation (FWO). It was the responsibility of the water board to provide land and electricity for the project but it failed and wasted three years from 2015 to 2018. The design and alignments of the project had to be changed again and again for unexplainable reasons.