ISLAMABAD: While the residents of the capital face an acute water shortage, each day gallons upon gallons of water gush out of a broken water pipeline in Sector F-7/4 and flow down the Marvi Road. Most residents of the area agree that the pipeline has been broken for at least two years.

A large pipe has been left at the street corner for the last many months, giving the impression that repairs are in progress, but the flow of water has not subsided.

Mohammad Kamran, a resident of Sector F-7/1, said: “Water has been flowing down this part of the road for so long that we routinely slow down our cars here, to prevent the tyres from spraying water on the car.”

“It is a tragedy that so much water is wasted, in a water scarce country such as ours,” he added.

The shortage of water in the capital grows each year and is expected to take on catastrophic proportions if wastage is not reduced and new sources are not tapped.

Last month, during a parliamentary committee meeting, the chairman of the Capital Development Authority (CDA) Maroof Afzal told participants that Islamabad’s daily requirement of water is 140 million gallons daily (MGD) but only 65 MGD water is available. According to him, each resident of the federal capital uses an estimated 60 gallons of water a day.

People use water from a broken pipeline to bathe and wash cars on Marvi Road in Sector F-7. — Photos by the writer

Meanwhile, for the water starved residents of the nearby France Colony, the broken pipeline on Marvi Road has become a welcome watering hole. For easy access, a trough has been dug in the ground from where the water flows out.

Each day, dozens of children come here, armed with makeshift buckets and cans to bathe in the clean CDA supply water, otherwise only available to them for a few minutes a day.

Ten-year-old Zakria and his cousin Micheal run around, splashing water on one another. “We come here to cool off on hot days and have fun bathing and playing with water,” says Zakria.

Others utilise the unlimited supply of water by washing their cars and even doing their laundry. Taxis are lined up on the side of the road and drivers throw buckets-full of water onto muddy tyres and dusty rubber mats.

A taxi driver, Arshad Iqbal, has also brought his children along.

“There hasn’t been a drop of water at our house in G-11 since morning, so my wife sent the children along so they could have a bath,” he said.

A resident of F-7/4, Mir Ali, said: “There is hardly a house left in this neighbourhood, which is dependent on CDA supply water. Almost 20 years ago, most people had bore wells dug because water was never supplied. Now it seems that the CDA would rather have water flow into gutters than supply it to residents.”

This is not the only broken pipeline in the capital. In the same neighbourhood, water would gush out on to the Nazimuddin Road from another broken pipeline. While a few months ago this pipeline was repaired, the capital’s rusty water supply lines, laid over 50 years ago lead to leakages in many other places.

In addition to wastage, broken pipes invite bacteria and lead to contamination of clean water.

Ramzan Sajid, a spokesperson for the CDA, told Dawn that the authority was working towards replacing the old and rusty lines of Islamabad’s water supply system. “In the meanwhile, the CDA chairman has constituted a monitoring team under the leadership of CDA Member Engineering, which identifies broken pipelines and repairs them to reduce wastage,” he said.

When asked why the monitoring team failed to notice a broken pipeline on a main road for two years, he said he would look into it.

Published in Dawn, August 11th, 2015

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