February 29, 2008	Friday	Safar 21, 1429

RAWALPINDI, Feb 28: Rawalpindi is to get an additional 100 million gallons of water per day from Tarbela dam by 2015 when the city is projected to become the fourth largest urban area of the country with a population of nearly 2.3 million.

A ‘siren pocket’ has been identified as the main source of water from the Tarbela lake where the level of water remains the same throughout the year even in case of low level of water in the lake.

In all 200 million gallons of water per day is planned to be pumped into three filtration plants for Islamabad and Rawalpindi to share equally. Rawalpindi’s cantonment and city areas would get 50 million gallons each, according to Col Hafiz Abdur Rahman (retd), Project Director of Khanpur Dam Water Supply Project.

After a feasibility study, financed by the cantonment boards of Rawalpindi and Chaklala and the Water and Sanitation Authority (WASA) of the Rawalpindi Development Authority (RDA), a PC-1 was produced and a summary of the project is now lying with the prime minister’s office for approval, he said.

Hafiz Rahman disclosed that the summary was prepared after removing the objections raised by Sindh’s representative in the Indus River System Authority (Irsa) to the project which is proposed to be completed in three phases by 2050.

Currently, Rawalpindi receives nine million gallons of water daily from the Khanpur dam. This supply will be augmented to 60 million gallons per day when the first phase of the project is completed by 2015.

Although the official saw no water scarcity in the city’s cantonment areas after the first phase, he said the cantonment boards should consider “metered water supply” to stop wasteful use of water by consumers.

At the same time he called for steps to check wastage of water through broken down and decaying water supply pipelines.

There are complaints about water leakage in almost every locality of the cantonment, but the cantonment boards’ staff rarely attend to them.