LAHORE, April 6: The Lahore High Court chief justice on Wednesday summoned the Water and Sanitation Agency (Wasa) managing director on April 19 in a suo motu case and writ petitions against the presence of arsenic in tubewells of the city. Former chief justice Khwaja Sharif had taken suo motu notice last year on the public interest matter and advocates Mateenul Haq and Muhammad Sohail Dar had filed petitions pointing out that due to dirty drinking water, Lahorites were suffering from hepatitis and other diseases. Chief Justice Ijaz Ahmad Chaudhry on Wednesday took notice of non-appearance of the Wasa MD and warned the legal adviser of the authority that the chief secretary would be summoned if the MD failed to appear on the next hearing.

The notice was taken on a news item, which stated that the Environment Protection Department through a report revealed that 253 tubewell out of a total 392 were supplying arsenic-contaminated water posing serious health hazardous to citizens.

The petitioner-lawyers took a plea that the Punjab government had given funds to Wasa for providing clean drinking water to the citizens, but these funds lapsed due to negligence on the part of the authorities concerned. And in reply to the allegations, Wasa said water was being supplied to consumers through a network of distribution system comprising ductile iron, cast iron, asbestos cement and high density polyethylene and polyvinyl chloride pipelines. And this system was regularly disinfected through chlorination. Wasa had installed filtration plants on many tubewells to prevent adulteration of substances which caused contamination while expert chemists check water quality on a daily basis.