REFERENCE your editorial ‘Rights for rivers’ (Marh 16), I would like to point out that I was the first person to request declaring the Indus river a living entity (my letter of June 12, 2017). This was subsequently picked up by the friends of the Indus River, and then by the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum.

Declaring the Indus as a living entity means that the river will have its own legal identity with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a legal person. There will be no legal difference between damaging the river and damaging the people. They are one and the same and subject to same charges and prosecution in the eye of the law.

The water commission, investigating water quality issues in Sindh, says that the worst situation was seen at places in Hyderabad where untreated industrial and sewerage effluent was disposed of into the Indus and irrigation canals, which are also a source of rural water supply schemes being used for supply of drinking water. It says that untreated sewerage continues to fall into irrigation water/canals at 750 places across Sindh.

There is heavy metal pollution in the Indus, Phuleli Canal and Kalri-Baghar owing to industrial and municipal wastewater discharges. At Jamshoro, the discharge of relatively warm water by power plants has two-fold adverse effect. One, warm water re-mobilises heavy metals from bottom sediments. Two, the dissolved oxygen levels of water decrease with increasing temperature.

Control over the discharge of untreated municipal and industrial wastewaters in surface water bodies in Sindh is the responsibility of the Sindh Environmental Protection Agency.

The Sindh Assembly should pass a resolution on the Indus River as a living entity.

F. H. Mughal

Hyderabad

Published in Dawn, March 25th, 2018