PESHAWAR: Residents of various localities of Tank district on Thursday held a rally against shortage of drinking water and warned that if water supply was not restored within two days they would observe a sit-in outside the Chief Minister House in Peshawar.

The protesters held the rally outside Peshawar Press Club, which was led by former MPA Ghulam Qadir Bettani. They were holding banners and placards inscribed with their demand for water supply.

They also shouted slogans against the officials of Public Health Engineering Department and local TMA for their failure to take practical steps for resolving the issue on emergency basis.

The former lawmaker said that the provincial government had floated a tender on Aug 2 for carrying out 19 projects of tubewells, but work could not be initiated so far. The local people, he said, had no other option but to consume contaminated water. He said that the government had been making claims about different schemes just to dodge the people.

Other protesters said that the local people had to pay Rs1,500 for a single water tanker, but the officials of public health engineering department and TMA were least bothered to pay heed to the problem. They said that only three of the 20 tubewells were functioning and several of them had been closed due to non-payment of power bills for the past many months.

They said that scores of people had fallen ill due to consumption of the contaminated water, warning that if the problem was not solved immediately they would announce a wheel-jam strike in Tank district.

Published in Dawn, October 13th, 2017