KASUR, July 6: The failure of the tehsil municipal administration (TMA) in revamping the collapsed sewerage system has forced the district administration to gird up its lions, but the way it has started work gives the impression that it has decided to dig up the entire city all at once. Encroachments are also being removed on a massive scale, although the district administration has no plan to stop people from encroaching upon the places which are being cleared of encroachers.

In an operation that began about two months ago, the slabs of drains along Railway Road, Circular Road, Haji Fareed Road, Kutchery Road, Naz Cinema Road and College Road have been removed. Same practice has been adopted in Naya Bazaar, Dalgiran Bazaar, Urdu Bazaar, Faisal Bazaar, Kumharan Bazaar, Kot Rukn-i-Din, Kot Badar-i-Din, Kot Androon and Kot Murad Khan to keep encroachers away. Steps of the shops built illegally have been demolished. The operation is, no doubt, much needed and praised by people, but more than eight feet wide and six feet deep open drains along the roads pose a serious threat to people’s lives and limbs. There seems to be a very little or no planning in the process.

The prevailing situation has put many shopkeepers with scant resources in hot waters because they are facing “a tremendous decrease in their sales” because they have open drains outside their shops. Moreover, this ill-planned operation is affecting people’s health. Instead of taking pre-monsoon measures, the drains have been left open and the result is the spread of diseases like diarrhoea, dysentery and gastroenteritis.

In 1984, the Public Health Engineering Department set up a disposal unit at Basti Vanika with a cost of Rs5 million. The unit, aimed at disposing sewage into Rohi Nullah, was maintained till 1991. Later, the municipality failed to maintain it and a mafia grabbed it and took away most of its machinery and gates and windows of the building. Later, the building remained in the use of businessmen and finally it fell to addicts and gamblers.

Now Kasur District Coordination Officer Abdul Jabbar Shaheen has taken over the unit and ordered its renovation.

Public Health Engineering Executive Engineer Nasir Iqbal said his department would evolve a mechanism to maintain the disposal unit, adding the district government was planning an agency that would be responsible for the unit’s maintenance.

The district government recently prepared a proposal of Rs660 million for the sewerage system. It was just ready to submit this proposal to the provincial government when Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif visited the area and asked the authorities concerned to also include phase two of the water treatment plant in the proposal.

The DCO said it was the prime responsibility of the TMA to remove encroachments and maintain the sewerage system, but he took over the sewerage project after the chief secretary asked him to remove encroachments, improve sanitation and sewerage system and provide people clean drinking water. He said he was trying to get the drains cleaned to ensure smooth working of the sewerage system for at least the next five years.

Kasur Tehsil Nazim Agha Naveed Hashim Rizvi said he wanted to undertake the sewerage project, but his opponents always created hurdles in his way.