KARACHI: The Supreme Court-mandated judicial commission on water and sanitation in Sindh on Friday expressed its resentment towards the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board for not installing flow meters on water pipelines and summoned its chief to appear before it on Saturday.

The one-man commission, headed by retired Justice Amir Hani Muslim, has repeatedly been issuing directives to the water and sewerage utility to install flow meters to ensure a fair distribution of water to consumers in the provincial capital.

Justice Muslim observed that repeated story of procurement was being placed before the commission, adding that the issue, which needed to be addressed, was not being answered in the explanation.

The commission said that the Supreme Court had also ordered the KWSB in the past that the water supply be metered, which was not confined to bulk water supply but also included the supply system down to the consumer level.

However, it deplored that the order was defied for one or the other reason and even the installed meters were non-operational and there was no vigilance of the KWSB as it was least interested in ensuring water to be gauged by meters.

On the contrary, they [KWSB officials] were more interested in providing water on manual basis in order to avoid efficient vigilance and record, it added.

Under these circumstances, the commission said that the managing director of the KWSB should personally appear on Saturday (today) since the explanations of his subordinates regarding instalment of flow meters were meaningless and did not serve the purpose.

Inspection of industries

The commission directed its focal person Syed Asif Hyder Shah to interact with the director general of the Sindh Environmental Protection Agency (Sepa) to resolve the issues regarding inspection of industries located in the city.

In the first phase, both officials will hold meetings with different associations of industries in Karachi and thereafter, Sepa will carry out inspections/surprise visits in order to ensure that the law was not violated, it added.

Meanwhile, the commission also asked the Sepa officials, who had previously been refused accesses to certain industries located in SITE-II, Phase-I, Malir, Superhighway, to again visit the same. If they were again denied the accesses, then FIRs be registered against them, it said, and directed the police to register cases for obstruction in the discharge of duty.

The commission asked Sepa to take the association concerned into confidence before registering cases.

SHC notices police officers

The Sindh High Court on Friday issued notices to the deputy inspector general of police (east), SP east and SHO of Korangi police station in a case pertaining to a missing boy, PPI adds.

While hearing the petition, the court directed the police officials to recover the missing boy within the next two days.

Qaim Ali Memon, the petitioner’s counsel, submitted in court that Hawaldar Shaukat had picked up the 12-year-old boy, Jahanzaib, during patrolling 10 days ago but there had been no clue to the boy’s whereabouts so far.Meanwhile, a division bench of the high court through an order allowed holding of the election for the Aligarh Muslim University Old Boys Association as per the schedule on Saturday (today).

Published in Dawn, December 29th, 2018