The department had notified the closure of canals across the province from January 1, 2012, for a month as part of its annual campaign. In real terms, said the executive engineer, canals in Peshawar’s urban centres were not closed 100 per cent. - File photo

PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government’s ongoing campaign of cleaning canals is proving useless and a wastage of public money as years of official neglect have turned them into sewage drains, officials say.

Millions of rupees being spent on cleaning the canal network are going down the drain as an executive engineer of the provincial irrigation department told Dawn on Sunday that canals, particularly in Peshawar, Mardan and other urban centres, cannot be cleaned at all under the prevalent situation.

“These (canals) are filled up again with all sorts of waste material hardly a week after the cleaning drive,” said the officer.

Shopping bags, plastic bottles, kitchen waste and human wastes can be seen flowing into irrigation canals that are replete with gutter pipes and sewage drains. This has made it impossible for any civic agency to keep these irrigation water channels clean, according to officials.

“We wrote several times to town/tehsil  municipal officers for taking action against perpetrators of the illegality, but no one has taken note of our reminders,” said the official.

District coordination officer, Peshawar, Siraj Ahmed Khan told Dawn that he had imposed Section 144, banning dumping of waste materials into canals. In several instances, he added, police had also registered cases under Section 188 of Pakistan Penal Code against the violators.

However, the problem is too complex to be resolved by introducing Section 144, according to irrigation officials and leaders of farmers’ associations.

Niamat Shah Roghani, president of Anjuman-i-Kashtkaran, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, said the problem had attained serious proportion in his Mardan district. Water flowing into Upper Swat canal, he added, was not clean because people constructing houses had diverted their gutter pipes into it.

“The irrigation department should take note of it, but it seems there is neither any department in our country nor writ of law,” said Mr Roghani.

An irrigation department development planner said on Saturday that the government had allocated Rs500 million in current financial year for removing silt from canals across the province.

A major part of the amount, he added, was spent on rebuilding damaged parts of canals, filling breaches and lining embankments.

Hazarkhawani canal, which passes through Peshawar’s urban locality, Joe Sheikh canal and Kabul River canal passing through Peshawar district were replete with sewage drains, said the planner.

“We have become tired of sending notices to the violators,” he said.

The violators, said the executive engineer, also included several government departments, including Peshawar Development Authority, Local Government and Rural Development Department, and Public Health Department.

They all have diverted their new buildings’ drainage to the nearby irrigation canals, said the engineer.

The irrigation official said that the police, too, were violating the Canal and Drainage Act. Plastic pipes from inside the Peshawar Police Lines have been draining sewage waste into the Hazarkhawani canal.

The DCO said that placement of sewage lines into irrigation canals by private households was posing a big public health issue. “The contaminated irrigation water is being used by farmers growing vegetables on the outskirts of Peshawar,” Mr Khan said.

The TMOs in Peshawar, he added, had been directed not to approve construction drawings (maps) for new buildings unless those included underground sewage tanks. New constructions in Peshawar, he added, were not being let to divert their drains to canals, he added.

However, the irrigation department’s reminders to the district governments for removing the sewage pipes and curbing dumping of solid waste into canals is an issue too big for the local authorities to tackle. About the department’s notices to the TMOs for removing the pipes, Peshawar’s DCO said: “mafias are involved.”

The department had notified the closure of canals across the province from January 1, 2012, for a month as part of its annual campaign. In real terms, said the executive engineer, canals in Peshawar’s urban centres were not closed 100 per cent.

“Sewage pipes diverted to canals caused to maintain a certain level of waste water all the time, rendering useless the official action of closing the water channels for cleaning,” said the officer.

Of Rs500 million allocated to canals’ maintenance, up to Rs250 million would be used for cleaning canals, said the official. He, however, said the money was insufficient for the work at hand.

Removing silt, he added, was not too huge a task for the department to take care of within the given resources, but the allocation was a peanut to remove solid waste and sewage waters that kept canals unclean.

The irrigation department, said the planner, had asked the provincial finance department for Rs1.5 billion for the annual canal cleaning drive.