RAWALPINDI, June 12: The district government’s plan to deeply install 14 new tubewells in the city may cause depletion of the water table, experts said.

District Nazim Raja Tariq Kiyani has given green signal for the district government to invite tenders for the Rs25 million project which would be completed in the next three to four months. The project is being financed by the federal government.

The water table has gone down significantly in Rawalpindi due to drought in the last three years. It went down by 50 feet last year and is now at 150 to 200 feet below the ground level in different parts of the city.

As many as 196 tubewells are supplying 15 MGD to the city, while the combined supply from the two dams — Rawal and Khanpur — adds up to just around 7 MGD.

The experts maintained that the new tubewells would deplete the water table and render the surrounding tubewells dysfunctional.

They said: “The ground water forms a cone at the point of deepest suction, which will cause the surrounding tubewells to dry up.”

They said the problem had assumed added significance at a time when the existing tubewells were drying up due to the diminishing water table.

They recalled that sometimes back the Water and Sanitation Agency (Wasa) had started deepening some of the drying tubewells to keep them functional. However, the project had to be abandoned when the surrounding wells started drying up.

A similar proposal was turned down by the Asian Development Bank for being technically unsound.

The consultants working with Wasa’s Project Management Unit in one of their recent studies concluded that there was no further potential for drilling new tubewells or deepening the existing ones in the city. The study recommended that only those tubewells should be refurbished, which required electrical and mechanical repairs. Almost 100 tubewells have been overhauled so far on the basis of this study.

The experts were of the view that new tubewells would aggravate the water scarcity problem and cause wastage of precious financial resources.

They regretted that Wasa had not apprised the district government on the proper situation. The district government, they added, appeared to be pursuing the project on political grounds with the objective of providing temporary relief to the people without taking into account the long-term consequences of the project.

It should be recalled here that previous political governments squandered over Rs1.5 billion on water supply schemes in Rawalpindi district. Currently, 49 of 67 such projects are non-functional. Some of these projects did not even have a water source, but pipelines were laid nonetheless. It is widely believed that the past governments doled out these projects to gain political mileage.