ISLAMABAD: Barely 15 days old, Kinza whimpers at an Islamabad hospital where she is suffering from diarrhoea and a blood infection, a tiny victim among thousands afflicted by Pakistan’s severely polluted and decreasing water supplies.
Cloaked in a colourful blanket, Kinza moves in slow motion, like a small doll. Her mother, Sartaj, does not understand how her daughter became so ill.
“Each time I give her the bottle, I boil the water,” she says.
But Sartaj and her family drink daily from a stream in their Islamabad neighbourhood — one of several waterways running through the capital that are choked with filth. Boiling the water can only do so much.
They are not alone. More than two-thirds of households drink bacterially contaminated water and, every year, 53,000 Pakistani children die of diarrhoea after drinking it, says Unicef.
Cases of typhoid, cholera, dysentery and hepatitis are rampant. According to the UN and Pakistani authorities, between 30 and 40 per cent of diseases and deaths nationwide are linked to poor water quality.
And it is costing the developing country billions. In 2012 the World Bank, which has warned that “substantial investments are needed to improve sanitation”, estimated that water pollution costs Pakistan $5.7 billion, or nearly four per cent of GDP.
“Water is the number one problem for the country,” says professor Javed Akram, vice-chancellor at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences in Islamabad.
In Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city, the situation is even worse than in Islamabad.
The Ravi River which supplies the city’s 11 million or so inhabitants with drinking water also serves as a spillway to hundreds of factories upstream.
River fish are eaten by locals, but “some papers show that in the fishbones, some heavy metal contamination (is) found,” says Sohail Ali Naqvi, a project officer with the conservation group WWF.
The Ravi is also used to irrigate neighbouring crops, which are themselves rich in pesticides, warns Lahore environmentalist Ahmad Rafay Alam.
The lack of water infrastructure is glaring. In a country where the “environment is not part of the political agenda”, there are “nearly no treatment plants”, warns Imran Khalid, a researcher at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute.
In Karachi, a megacity whose population could be as many as 20 million people, mafias fill the vacuum left by the creaking local network, selling the precious water they bring in by tanker trucks at high prices.
— AFP
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