PESHAWAR, March 21: Provinces are reluctant to bear financial liabilities of water purification plants being installed by the federal government at the union council level. Representatives of the four provinces at the Central Development Working Party (CDWP) meeting, which approved the project on Tuesday, expressed reservations over the future operations of these plants, Dawn learnt on Wednesday.

The Clean Drinking Water for All (CDWA), an amalgamation of two projects initiated during the last couple of years, will cost about Rs15 billion. Under the plan 6,035 water filtration plants will be installed across the country.

The federal government will finance major project cost, whereas the provinces will set up project management units at their respective capitals for coordinating the overall operation.

First three years’ maintenance and operational cost of the plants will be borne by the federal government. It will be later handed over to the district governments.

Sources said the provinces were of the view that the district governments neither had financial resources to run such plants nor capacity to handle such a technical job.

As per the plan, the federal government will hire 6,025 operators for running these purification plants at a monthly salary of Rs5,000 which will be drawn from the federal kitty. Later, districts will be responsible for that.

“This will increase financial liabilities of the districts which are already facing growing recurrent expenditures,” the sources maintained.

The provinces also have reservations over the water distribution network because they would have to lay down pipelines to supply purified water from the plants within union councils, sources added.

The CDWP meeting took serious notice of the non-functioning of filtration plants already installed under the Clean Drinking Water Initiative at various places in the country.

In the NWFP alone, 71 sites have been identified for the project, out of which 42 have been completed but only 23 are functional.

The provinces also have reservations over the timeframe given for the completion of filtration plants which will have to be completed within 16 months.

The sources pointed out that water sources for every purification plant had to be certified by the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources which, according to the provinces, did not have the capacity to undertake this task within a specified period.