KARACHI, Oct 29: The Karachi Water and Sewerage Board is facing financial crisis as different federal, provincial ministries and civic bodies have yet to pay their dues amounting to Rs3,175.33 million.

The KWSB work has been suffering due to this non-recovered amount for quite long and repeated reminders to concerned ministries have not brought any positive outcome so far, an official of KWSB stated on condition of anonymity.

He maintained that if this amount was recovered, a number of development works could be carried out. However, owing to the outstanding dues, the board has to pay electricity bills to the KESC in instalments, he added. If the things go on in the same fashion, the board could face unbearable financial crisis, he said.

It is worth mentioning here that only four per cent consumers pay their water bills to the KWSB.

Different federal, provincial and civic departments owe the amount on water, sewerage, conservancy and fire tax. Federal ministries, which have not paid the outstanding dues so far, include defence, works, central board of revenue, cabinet division, finance, communication, science and technology.

The defence ministry owed Rs1,036.759 million while works ministry owed Rs157.923 million to the KWSB. The amount owed by the Central Board of Revenue is Rs4.320 million. Cabinet division is to pay Rs1.780 million, finance ministry is to pay Rs2.565 million, science and technology is to pay Rs10.861 million to the board for outstanding dues. The SITE owed Rs642.700 million and the defunct Karachi Development Authority owed Rs202.542 million on different services provided by KWSB.

The KWSB concerned official, when asked, said that this matter had been raised a lot of times with the high ups of these ministries and a number of letters had also been written to resolve this problem. However, no concrete steps had been taken on the issue, he added.

He informed that the KWSB authorities had also taken the problem with authorities in Islamabad, but, no positive outcome had been achieved so far. —PPI