KARACHI: On the outskirts of the slums of Kara­chi, protesters burning tyres and throwing stones have what sounds like a simple demand: They want water at least once a week.

But that’s anything but in Karachi, where people go days without getting water from city trucks, sometimes forcing them to use groundwater contaminated with salt.

A recent drought has only made the problem worse. And as the city of roughly 18 million people rapidly grows, the water shortages are only expected to get worse.

“During the last three months they haven’t supplied a single drop of water in my neighbourhood,” protester Yasmeen Islam said. “It doesn’t make us happy to come on the roads to protest but we have no choice anymore.”

Karachi gets most of its water from the Indus River — about 550 million gallons per day — and another 100 million gallons from the Hub Dam that is fed by water from Balochistan.

But in recent years, drought has hurt the city’s supply. Misbah Fareed, a senior official with the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board, said that [amount of water] only met about half the city’s needs — 1.2 billion gallons a day. Karachi’s water distribution network has exacerbated the problem by forcing much of the city to get its water through tankers ins­tead of directly from pipes.

The KWSB operates 12 water hydrants around the city where tankers fill up and then distribute. Even people in the richest areas of the city get their water through tankers that come a few times a week to fill up underground cisterns. But criminals have illegally tapped into the city’s water pipes and set up their own distribution points where they siphon off water and sell it.

“I personally know some people previously associated with drug mafias who now have switched to the water tanker business,” Mr Fareed said. “Just imagine how lucrative the business is.”

Other areas in the country pump massive amounts of groundwater. But in Karachi, the underground water is too salty to drink. Many people have pumps but they use the water for things such as showering or washing clothes.

The water shortage is exacerbated by Karachi’s massive population. Military operations and American drone strikes in northern tribal regions, as well as natural disasters such as flooding and earthquakes, have pushed people toward a city long seen as the economic heart of Karachi.

The city is trying to increase the amount of water it gets from the Indus River by building another canal — dubbed the K4 project. But even if they were to get political approval from Islamabad to take more water from the river, it would take a minimum of four years to build. But analysts say supply isn’t the only problem.

Farhan Anwar, who runs an organisation called Sus­tainable Initiatives in Kara­chi, says the KWSB is horribly overstaffed and many of those are political appointees. The cost for water is also very low and the agency doesn’t collect all of its dues, Mr Anwar said. That has made it difficult to upgrade the aging pipelines, meaning contamination and leakages are common.

Meanwhile, the city residents have to spend more money or walk further and further to get water. One elderly resident Aisha Saleem said that in recent months even the little water they got from the water board is salty. “Women and kids have to go miles by foot and carry drinking water every day,” she said.

Published in Dawn, August 25th, 2014