LAHORE: After its clean water initiative, the Punjab government is set to launch a province-wide Saaf Dehat (clean villages) Programme in April and will run it till December in the first phase, a meeting on solid waste management and water stocktaking was informed on Wednesday.

Presided over by Education Minister Rana Mashhood Ahmad, the meeting is held on a quarterly basis in which the progress of health, education, water and solid waste management sectors is tracked against a set of pre-determined targets.

In rural Punjab, before scaling the Clean Punjab strategy province-wide, a pilot, in partnership with Unicef, was completed in Bahawalpur, Okara and Kasur districts. The success in pilot districts like Kasur prompted the chief minister and the Punjab government to launch the “Khadim-e-Punjab Saaf Dehat Programme” on a wider scale.

In the stocktaking meeting on clean water, it was discussed that the Punjab launched clean water roadmap in 2015 for improving water quality and ensuring the province’s 110 million citizens had access to clean and safe drinking water. A number of initiatives were taken, including construction of 116 water filtration plants in Bahawalpur by the Saaf Pani Company, which are now serving 350,000 people.

Two phases of community mobilisation campaigns have been carried out which have increased utilisation (from 44 percent to 75pc) of these plants. The government has also rehabilitated 274 dysfunctional rural water schemes at a cost of Rs730 million which has benefited 1.3 million people in the province.

During the meeting, it was discussed how the clean water roadmap had put in place a monitoring system to collect data on water quality. Technological interventions such as Geo-tagging and monitoring dashboards have been developed and are being leveraged to ensure that accurate and reliable data is generated for effective monitoring.

The achievements in the Clean Punjab Roadmap were also discussed. In the urban sector, waste collection is carried out through seven WMCs (waste management companies) each in Lahore, Rawalpindi, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Faisalabad, Multan and Bahawalpur.

Operations of all the seven WMCs are planned to be outsourced to private international contractors to improve operations. Two WMCs; of Lahore and Rawalpindi, have already been outsourced to private international contractors from Turkey -- Al-Bayrak and Ozpak -- to manage all their operations. Similarly, outsourcing of the remaining five companies is also under process. Two of the seven WMCs, those of Lahore and Multan have landfill sites. For the rest, landfills are under process and their progress was discussed in the stocktake.

The WMCs without landfill sites have temporary disposal sites. As for creating economic value from the collected waste, progress on installing a waste-to-energy plant was also discussed, among other alternatives.

The stocktakes are an important part of the roadmap process, where progress and issues are discussed in a transparent, honest and constructive manner. Important decisions are then taken with inputs from the government, the development partners- DFID and others, besides sector experts and stakeholders.

At the opening of the last stocktakes of the solid waste management and water sectors, renowned educationist Sir Michael Barbar said, “Punjab is the leading example in the world where delivery and technology have been combined to improve service delivery.”

Head of DFID-Pakistan, Joanna Reid, said: “We must take the roadmap further and start to address the complex issues of solid waste and clean water.”

Published in Dawn, March 22nd, 2018