LAHORE, Nov 29: Taking a serious notice of delay in the installation of filtration plants in the country, Federal Industries Minister Jehangir Tareen has directed all provinces to at least make functional those installed so far by Dec 20 so that a report could be submitted to President Musharraf by the end of the month.

He has asked the provinces to now concentrate merely on removing faults in the installed filtration plants and make them operational by Dec 20, sources said here on Wednesday.

The minister had called representatives of local government departments in all the provinces to Islamabad a couple of days ago to know reasons for the delay in the project which the federal government wants to complete by the end of next year.

In the first phase all provinces were to install one plant each in nearly 455 tehsils in the country by the end of last year. In Punjab, these have been installed in 115 out of total 144 tehsils even after the passage of one year of the deadline. And half of them are not reportedly functioning owing to various reasons. The situation in the other provinces is even worse.

One each plant is also to be installed in 6,055 unions councils in the country, out of them 3,464 are in Punjab alone, by December next year. But so far approval has not been granted in this respect by the federal government.

The plants are being supplied and installed by around 91 companies, most of them allegedly have no previous experience of civil works.

Sources said lack of technical know-how was the main cause of the non-functioning of the installed plants. But local political rivalries were also contributing towards the delay in the completion of the project.

Political confrontations halted the process in nine tehsils in Punjab whereas half of Balochistan was facing this problem. The situation in Sindh and the NWFP too was not different.

“Nazims of even the ruling parties want installation of the plants in their constituencies, making others to use their political clout to block them and the result is the endless delay,” the sources said.

They said it would have been better had the government planned installation of the plants in areas where water was polluted. The plants were costly and running them on permanent grounds was even costlier.

They claimed that clean water could easily be provided to people through the less costly chlorination but even the tehsils did not have the expertise to do it. As to how they would be able to run the plants which were more technical, they asked.