KOHAT, Dec 24: The sanitary conditions in the city are deteriorating day by day, as none of departments concerned takes responsibility for repairing leaking sewer lines laid almost a decade ago.

Broken roads, ruptured water pipelines, choked sewers and overflowing gutters at almost every square in the bazaar and cantonment have been testing the nerves of citizens. While all the officials of municipality and other civic departments pass through the same dirty streets and inundated roads, they fail to take notice of the bad sanitary conditions. In such a situation, the residents continue to wait for a saviour to solve their problems.

The ongoing tussle and shifting of responsibilities among various line departments has also compounded the nuisance for public who daily face the trouble emanating from leaking water lines at the roundabout near girls college and sewer line near Jinnah Plaza.

The entire newly-constructed road needed urgent patchwork and a part of it had disappeared at the main square in the city due gushing water from the broken pipeline – a problem now one year old. The roundabout connects girls' postgraduate college, government high school No 2 for boys, a primary school and vegetable market besides the Hangu road.

The continued tug of war between the provincial minister for housing and senior bureaucrats for the last three years for appointing their blue-eyed person as tehsil municipal officer was another major reason for the worst civic situation in the city. Only in last few months two municipal officers have been appointed and removed from their posts.

The TMA staff says that it is humanly impossible for the sweepers to remove tonnes of waste, including plastic bags, with the help of shovels as no machinery could enter the narrow streets from where the main sewer passes. The TMA imported a small tractor from China for removing heaps of filth, but it developed fault which could not be removed locally for the last four years, they said.

The chief planning officer, chief sanitary inspector, water supply branch and tehsil municipal officer have been shrugging off responsibility of repairing the road and holding the public health engineering department responsible for laying low quality pipelines in the city. Recently, the district government repaired the whole route of mourners' procession within a night, but left the small piece of the important roundabout without fixing the problem.

About two weeks back MPA Qalbe Hassan had also ordered 'immediate repair' of the leaking pipeline besides carpeting of the road, but since then an unending tussle had ensued and no department was ready to own responsibility for repair of year-old leaking pipeline.

Also, the stinking smell from broken sewer line near the Shah Faisal Gate and Jinnah Plaza has made the life of business community, who invested billions of rupees in the shopping center, extremely miserable for the last three years.

Situation in the cantonment area is no different – a broken gutter spreading stinking smell in the business hub of the city on the courts' road also awaits attention of the city fathers.