SANGHAR, June 3: An acute shortage of drinking water has hit the city as some of its areas like Zahid Town have not received water for the last five months. The worst hit areas include the Housing Society, Al-Masoora Society, Dhak Para and Mithi Khooi.

The residents told Dawn that since Jan last drinking water was provided to the localities only twice — in April during the visit of President Gen Pervez Musharraf and in May when women of the city took to streets to protest against water shortage.

The residents deplored that water had become such a rare commodity here that a 200-litre drum of water was available for Rs80 to 110, and that too stinking, muddy and unfit for human consumption.

They alleged that the city municipality had only one water tanker trailed by a tractor, which supplied water only to Nazims, Naib Nazims, bureaucrats and bigwigs and not to common people.

When this correspondent visited the city’s water reservoirs at the old and new water supply schemes on Monday, the five reservoirs out of the six, each with a capacity of about 4.3 million gallons, was dry. Only in tank No.3 there was ankle-deep water and more than two dozen people were filling drums kept on donkey carts with the help of buckets and cans. The water was stinking and dirty as it contained mud.

An attendant at the water supply pumping station told this scribe that the irrigation officials were releasing very little water into the Toori Minor which supplied water to the reservoirs. He added that whenever water was released into the waterway, some influential landlords tampered with the modules of watercourses and thus stole water by diverting it to their fields with the connivance of the irrigation officials.

As a result citizens have been deprived of drinking water. To coup with the scarcity of water, some people have installed hand-pumps to fetch the underground water but that too is very difficult because due to drought-like conditions the water table has gone down. Besides, the underground water is brackish and unfit for human use and can only be used for washing purpose.

Many people of the city are suffering from hepatitis-B and C, jaundice and gastrointestinal diseases due to consumption of low quality of water.

TWO HURT: Two men were injured in an armed clash over an old enmity near the Chowdagi drain.