Troubled waters

What makes water a highly mismanaged commodity in Karachi

By Alia Ahmed

Tauheed Colony, in Karachi’s Orangi Town, is thirsty. Its residents used to receive water in their taps once a month for a few blessed hours, but that too has dwindled to a stingy trickle. A defunct water pumping station installed by the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board (KWSB) in 1990, meant to service 4,000 households, squats uselessly nearby. Its archaic generator has broken down but locals say those in charge of running the pump sell off the fuel required to run it anyway. An old man who has, like many others, come from his home to fill a bucket of water from a small well dug next to the non-functional machinery, is angry that people have forgotten the religious teachings of Islam with respect to doing their jobs properly. “Muslims aren’t supposed to treat each other this way.” He leaves holding a plastic bucket of yellow water intended for drinking. Bits of sand and dirt float at the bottom of the bucket.

It is within this vast vacuum created by an inefficient KWSB that the informal – and predatory – sector steps in. Karachi’s forgotten, who live in quatter settlements and comprise over half the city’s explosive population, pay well over 10 times the official market rate for water by turning to private suppliers when their faucets run dry. “The KWSB charges 150 rupees per 1,000 gallons of water. A tanker of 1,200 gallons will cost about 2,500 rupees,” says Dr Noman Ahmed, a water expert and chairman of the Architecture and Planning Department at the NED University of Engineering and Technology.

Three kinds of tanker operators step in as an alternative to piped water supply, according to Ahmed. The first supplies water from official KWSB hydrants; either providing free or subsidised water to certain locations identified by KWSB, or charging designated clientele at commercial rates. The second category of tanker operators supply brackish water drawn from boreholes for non-drinking purposes and which is often used at construction sites as well as for other industrial purposes. The last kind of operator punctures KWSB’s main pipelines and resells sweet water at predatory rates — water that would otherwise be pumped into the parched homes of Tauheed Colony and elsewhere.

“This is done in connivance with the water board officials,” says Ahmed, a fact KWSB has gone on record to admit in the past. “It stands to reason,” elaborates the professor, “that without someone in the know telling you where to go and dig down, how do you know where to find the joints where the pipes meet?”

Numerous illegal hydrants across the city allow private vendors, in the form of unlicensed tankers, to profit and thrive off the city’s thirst. Any attempts by the water board to seal unauthorised hydrants meet with protests and ultimately fail — an inevitability when officials within the KWSB rely on private vendors to line their pockets. However, the most expensive source of potable water is not the expansive tanker with its elaborate artwork, but the primordial donkey cart, able to deliver limited amounts of sweet water to households. Citizens with water to spare will also sometimes resell water to their neighbours.

It is not uncommon for poor communities in the developing world to rely on private water enterprises when public utilities cannot reach them. But in Karachi, all socio-economic groups face water shortages; “a fact that motivates vendors to target wealthier neighbourhoods with a relatively high effective demand,” writes Roohi Abdullah, a World Bank specialist on water issues. “Thus, wealthier households ... tend to purchase vended water more frequently than lower-income households who are forced to rely more heavily on standpipes and private wells.”

The KWSB routinely draws the public’s ire, not only for its inability to deliver water, but also for the poor quality of water it does provide. “We cannot even make tea with that water,” a resident of Old Golimar says. “No matter how much milk you put in, it still stays black.” Another resident exhibits sores on the legs of her three-year-old child; the result of bathing in contaminated water. In the same locality thrives the marble-cutting industry, which requires a constant stream of water, much of which turns into hazardous waste after it helps cut, slice and polish marble slabs.

But like every other story, there are two sides to the tale of water in Karachi. A staggering 90 per cent of users registered with the KWSB do not pay their water bills. The cash-strapped water board recovers only 10 per cent of its rightful dues.

“In my research...I found that a sizable number of people felt that water was a God-gifted commodity. Therefore, they did not have to pay for it,”

says Ahmed. Others either refused to pay because they found KWSB’s services to be subpar or because they believed the rates were too high. “But in fact,” Ahmed notes, “the rates the water board charges are ridiculously low.”

A source within the KWSB who requested not to be named confirms Ahmed’s research.

“At least half of those living in katchi abadis do not pay. This mindset is especially prevalent among those who come to Karachi from rural areas and who used to meet their water demand from ponds, lakes and rivers. They say, ‘We’ve never paid for water in the past. So why should we pay now?’”

Despite the non-payment of bills, KWSB is pressurised to supply water to these areas at all cost, for fear of strikes and riots, the source continued.

“What’s most unfortunate is that those who do pay their bills don’t get water because they are less likely to affect the law and order situation. The law-abiding citizen gets taken for granted.”

The latter statement is especially true due to the near ubiquitous presence of suction pumps installed by private citizens in their homes to increase water flow for their personal consumption. “Every house in Defence Housing Authority (DHA) has a suction pump,” says veteran water expert Simi Kamal. “If, as a law-abiding citizen, you don’t install one, you won’t get any water. Installing a pump in only one household will affect the water supply of the whole street.”

Ironically, an environment of (man-made) scarcity has not bred water conservation, but rather, waste. Homes in DHA and Clifton consume huge amounts of water to keep their large lawns green, and an overall absence of civic sense and accountability prevents residents from ensuring that their pipes and taps aren’t leaky. “After installing illegal suction pumps, people waste water by having huge lawns, washing their cars with a hose instead of a bucket of water and sponge, and tolerating leaky taps and commodes in their houses,” Kamal points out. “Then, they go and buy water from tankers, which is stolen water.”

According to Hisaar Foundation, an organisation which works on issues related to water and food security, one leaky toilet can waste up to 60 litres of water a day. Research by the same organisation indicates that 40 per cent of Karachi’s water is lost through leakage before consumption.

But water wastage is not restricted to DHA or Clifton, as it is prevalent across the city. It’s not uncommon to witness water gushing onto roads or tankers leaking their precious cargo onto the streets. Because water isn’t monetised, it holds no intrinsic value.

“Unless water usage is metered, unless meters are installed in every home and business and pricing is based on how much water is consumed, the wastage won’t stop,”

Kamal continues.

At the moment, KWSB tariffs are based on the size of the plot of land on which a home, business or institution is built. The main obstacle to metering, says the source inside the KWSB, is that municipal water supply is not constant. Unless water flows through pipes for 24 hours a day, it is difficult to use meters to quantify it.

Nevertheless, private consumers are not the only ones to blame for the Board’s financial problems. The biggest billing defaulters are various departments of the provincial government. To date, the Sindh government owes the water board 35 billion rupees, according an insider. In turn, KWSB is unable to pay its own bills. “Our electricity bill is 600 million rupees a month. We cannot pay it,” he says, which then prevents K-Electric from managing its own finances, spawning a vicious cycle of circular debt in the city.

A few years ago, when the Sindh Rangers were called in to manage KWSB’s hydrants after the board’s employees were being attacked by people protesting water shortages, the shocking extent of the water utility’s inefficiency came to light. Through a combination of greater efficiency and exorbitant prices even for water which was meant to be either free or subsidised, the Rangers made a substantial amount of money by handling only three per cent of the city’s water supply. Sources say they made anywhere between 20 billion rupees and 50 billion rupees per year from running the hydrants. “Twenty billion rupees, by my estimates,” confides the KWSB source.

“And 50 billion rupees according to [slain director of the Orangi Pilot Project] Parween Rehman.” In contrast, the KWSB made only hree billion rupees annually during those years even when it was still managing the remaining 97 per cent of Karachi’s water supply.

One major reason why the KWSB continues operating at a loss is the amount of water leaked through creaky pipelines – about 10 per cent – and water theft by the tanker mafia who siphon off roughly 35 per cent of the KWSB’s water. Together with a poor billing mechanism, such water losses led international donors to suggest the board’s privatisation.

In 1994 and again in 1995, a World Bank mission arrived in Karachi to discuss the privatisation of the KWSB with the Sindh government. The mission presented the provincial government with “a blue print for radical reform of Karachi’s water and sanitation sector with [private sector partnership] as the focal theme,” writes Ahmed in his monograph, Privatization of KWSB: An Analysis, published in 2000.

But the push for privatisation proved highly unpopular on all fronts. Ordinary consumers were weary of the inevitable price hikes, which would disproportionately affect the poor. Likewise, politicians, city managers and elected mayors and councillors realised that backing the move would make them enormously unpopular among their constituents, and decrease their clout in running the affairs of the KWSB. Many of the Board’s officers also opposed privatisation.

They argued that KWSB’s outstanding problems could be sorted out internally if they were given greater decision-making powers. Even the defence establishment, Ahmed points out, was not in favour of privatisation, fearing that it may jeopardise the security of its various military installations which receive water from the KWSB.

“The only lobby which was relatively in favour of KWSB’s privatisation were private builders and developers … but obviously their voice emanated from a very commercial and market-oriented background so not many people took them very seriously,” explains Ahmed. On hearing various complaints and petitions brought against privatisation, the Sindh High Court eventually issued a stay order to stall it.

Today, the KWSB is an addled beast. An overstaffed, yet under-skilled, corrupt cash-cow for the city’s leading political parties, mandated with the herculean task of being the sole water provider to a city of approximately 20 million people. Yet, there are reformers amid its ranks, seeking to implement strategies to keep up with the demands of an exponentially growing population. “We have not been sleeping on our job,” says Herald’s source within the KWSB. “We have a long-term vision; a master plan for the city till the year 2025. But, neither the federal nor the local government will give us the time or money to implement it despite our best efforts.”

Making a case for investment in reforming KWSB and its water supply system, he says, “Karachi is mini Pakistan. All ethnicities reside here; people come from all over the country to find work in the country’s financial hub. The federal government should invest in this sector because of the city’s cosmopolitan nature.”

The acute lack of political will is not only proving problematic for the struggling water board, it is discouraging international donors as well. With support and financial backing from the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (Jica), the KWSB has created a master plan which includes a blue print for a new institutional framework to overhaul and streamline the organisation. Under the framework of this plan, the city’s bulk water supply will continue to be managed by the government but the government will then sell it to three independent corporate water utilities in charge of supplying water to Karachi’s hree hydraulic zones — east, west and central. A regulatory body will also be created to safeguard the consumers’ interests.

Such an arrangement, if implemented, may undercut political interference and relegate the government’s role to policy and planning. Yet the government has been sitting on the proposal for several years. “Jica has been working with the KWSB for the last 10 years to put together a governance plan which it has agreed to finance,” says Zohair Ashir, chairperson of Hisaar Foundation.

“So, while those benefiting from the KWSB’s inefficiency come to the table and talk – because they cannot openly come out against improving things – they make sure such reforms don’t get implemented. To the credit of the Japanese, they are still talking and willing to give us this plan,” says Ashir.

Round the corner from where the dilapidated pumping station exists in Tauheed Colony, a new venture is coming up: a purification system to provide clean, piped drinking water to the desperately dry neighbourhood. For reasons nobody can explain, a pipe leading from the under construction filtration plant gushes water onto the dusty street outside. Given the unending afflictions plaguing the KWSB, the new enterprise could well suffer the fate of the rotting machinery of the pumping station. In the interim period, however, at least for the short term, it may relieve the thirst of the parched colony.

The political board game

How sinecure appointments mar KWSB's performance

By Maqbool Ahmed

Muhammad Nauman vividly remembers how in November 2002 he got a job as a clerk in the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board (KWSB). “One day I was told by the local head of [a religious party] in my area to meet an account officer in KWSB’s taxation office in Orangi Town,” he tells the Herald. The moment he met the officer, he got the job — no written test, no interview, not even a cursory glance at his qualifications.

Nauman says the man who gave him the job knew that “I had neither the skills for the job nor could I give my work as much time it needed.” Still he got the job because he shared political as well as ethnic ties with the official who appointed him. “I never made it to the office on time but [the accounts officer] would politely advise me to be punctual and diligent.” Both knew the punishment for not being punctual was never going to be higher than a softly spoken word of advice. There was no incentive to perform and deliver.

There are thousands of employees at KWSB who, like Nauman, landed their low-level jobs because of their political or ethnic affiliations. Most of them rarely went to work, yet they recieved paychecks every month. An official tells the Herald that KWSB appointments for political workers has been going on since the 1980s through the 1990s when it was part of the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC).

“One cannot accuse a single political party of placing its members in KWSB on political grounds,”

he says, adding that each one has done the same when granted the power to do so. The official says 15,259 people are employed at KWSB on pay scales between 1 and 16.

Officials at KWSB’s finance department tell the Herald that the board is grossly overstaffed and salaries alone eat up 40 per cent of its non-development budget, which includes such important expenses as maintenance of the water supply system and meeting contingencies such as rains or severe and unforeseen water shortages. These officials also say rightsizing the staff strength at the board will save two billion rupees to two and a half billion rupees every year, which can then go to more constructive use like the repair and upkeep of the supply system.

KWSB’s budget documents for the year 2013-2014 throw up some interesting details about how some politically appointed employees are only sinecures. A line guard, for instance, is working in the office of the chairman, with no defined duties, even though his original job is to guard water pipelines; a valve man serves as a personal staff member in the office of the managing director, irrespective of the fact that his job is to regulate water supply in the field; another valve-man works in the “Books Section” in the finance department. Both deputy directors of KWSB’s taxation offices in Landhi and Gulshan Town have employed nannies at the board’s expense.

A former KWSB audit officer holds the Employees’ (Appointment, Promotion and Transfer) Rules, 1987, responsible for the trend of hiring people on the basis of political affliations. These rules give unbridled powers to the KWSB managing director to make appointments for jobs falling between pay scale 1 and pay scale 16, he says. These powers were used by successive provincial governments and mayors of Karachi to have their political affiliates appointed in the KWSB, he adds.

The other flawed law which leads to such appointments is the KWSB Act 1996, which gives the Sindh government a free hand to appoint anyone of its choosing as the chairman and vice chairman of the board. Through an unwritten rule, the mayor of Karachi will always be KWSB’s chairman. This arrangement, effectively, gave the party heading the provincial government and the party ruling the city – which in most situations would be different from each other – a massive say in the process of appointments through the managing director.

Officials at KWSB’s finance department also say that replacing the politically appointed staff members with competent professionals, hired on merit and retained on the basis of performance, will benefit the board by expanding its revenues. As of now, KWSB has only 1,684,281 retail consumers on its billing list – less than one per cent of the estimated total population of the city – but this could expand by at least another 0.7 million to 0.9 million retail users, if the billing system is made more efficient and effective. If that system alone can be improved by increasing the productivity of the people working there, the KWSB will have sufficient funds to develop more water supply schemes through its own resources, a finance official says.

Surprise in a bottle

The side effects of the booming demand for bottled water

By Faiza Shah

From major multinational corporations to medium- and small-scale enterprises, the water bottling industry has been thriving consistently. This is surprising, considering that bottled water is a costly option and the privilege of choice, at a high price tag of, say, 150 rupees for a 19-litre bottle. In the past two decades, the demand for bottled water has increased, globally and locally. In 1999, bottled water consumption around the world was reported at 33 million litres per annum but it augmented to 295.5 million litres in 2007, with the industry experiencing a 30 per cent growth in 2007 alone in terms of volume, according to Safe Drinking Water in Pakistan, a report by German researcher Nils Rosemann. This 30 per cent growth amounted to 6.7 billion rupees in revenues that year, the report adds.

The presence of water in blue-capped clear plastic bottles is ubiquitous. Every third roadside store in any area in Karachi will certainly have slim plastic bottles of 500 ml of water, cooling in its refrigerator. The labels may vary, from unknown Water Plus, Marbella, Sea Breeze and Elixir to more familiar ones. Nestlé, of course, is the leading player in Pakistan’s bottled water industry. In 2013, it had a 53 per cent share of retail sales in the country, according to Euromonitor International, a business magazine.

Basic tests conducted by the Herald on bottled water of different brands selected randomly, however, showed that the quality of water found in Nestlé and Aquafina bottles was not quite different from the one found in lesser known brands — with all of them being safe for the purpose of drinking.

Brand names for bottled water are aplenty, from prosaic to dramatic, and the list keeps expanding, as one finds in the reports that the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR) – a government organisation – releases in newspapers, of brands selling water unsafe for consumption. Three such reports have been issued just this year, with the latest appearing in July 2014, which have declared altogether around 67 brands of bottled water available in the markets as unsafe. According to PCRWR, what makes water unsafe for drinking is high levels of chemicals and arsenic.

Usually these reports carry an ddendum, lamenting that no further action has been taken by the government against those putting out water unfit for drinking.

Who is to take ‘further action’ against such producers and profiteers? What reaction do PCRWR reports elicit aside from spreading awareness among the consumers of suspect drinking water? Pakistan Standards and Quality Control Authority (PSQCA), which works under the Federal Ministry of Science and Technology, has signed an agreement with the PCRWR under which the two organisations share scientific information about bottled water and conduct combined researches and lab tests.

The other area where the PSQCA complements the work of PCRWR is in devising a list of thorough checks for ensuring that the products conform to nationally recognised standards. The PSQCA officers also have the authority to fine around 50,000 rupees in six months if a bottling plant is not producing water in conformity with national standards — or seal it altogether if it continues flouting those standards.

But there are only 85 bottling plants, producing 107 brands of water, which possess a certification license from the PSQCA and where the authority can enforce its standards. In February 2014, the PSQCA launched a crackdown against illegal producers of bottled water in Karachi. But such crackdowns remain limited, mainly because the PSQCA neither has the human resources to carry them out on a large scale nor does it have the backing of law-enforcement agencies to enforce its writ where it may meet resistance.

“Mafias are there,” admits Pir Bakhsh Jamali, the PSQCA director general. “They receive exemption [because of the support they enjoy],” he tells the Herald.

The manager of a bottling plant in Gulshan-e-Iqbal area candidly states that no one visits his plant to check his operations — no consumer and no inspector, either. Media persons, he claims, can be bribed to say that the water he produces is better than Nestlé’s. The plant’s licence had expired a month before he took over its management. Within the plant, which is a small room fitted with a reverse osmosis (RO) machine, there is water sloshing around in tubs, which need a scrub.

A palm-sized monitor to keep track of total dissolved solids in water is hooked above the doorway of the room. It is the only check to go by to ensure the quality of water being bottled. The paint on the walls is crumbling, the floor is cracked. Electricity is erratic. Scores of 19-litre empty plastic bottles lying around are clearly being reused over and over again.

Running small and medium-scale bottled water plants, in conformity with all the PSQCA requirements, yields only low return on investment and, therefore, low profits for the producers. In fact, RO plants, which are the most reliable way of purifying groundwater and which are used by most small plants, are extremely resource-intensive, explains Dr Noman Ahmed, chairman of the Architecture and Planning Department at the NED University of Engineering and Technology, who has done extensive research on water over the last many years.

“You have to invest an enormous amount of money to build these plants and the membranes that they use for the purpose of purifying water get choked up very soon. The best of the membranes ... do not last for more than three years.”

The profit margin is higher for the bigger brands. “It is estimated that a bottle of 1.5 litres has production costs of 12.51 rupees ... while it is sold for 22 rupees ...” wrote Rosemann in a 2005 report entitled Drinking Water Crisis in Pakistan and the Issue of Bottled Water — The Case of Nestlé’s ‘Pure Life’. sides quality and pricing, the other major problem with bottled water plants is their huge environmental impact. Indeed, the more they conform to the quality standards the more hazardous they become for the environment.

“The very undesirable by-product that RO plants generate is that they produce four gallons of waste water for one gallon of potable, drinkable water,” says Ahmed. Untreated, this waste water gets mixed up in the city’s already hazardous sewage.

The main source of bottled water is groundwater which is acquired through boring underground.

The water thus extracted is not mineral water or sweet water but ‘zero water’ – or raw water – in local lingo. It is treated through various kinds of purification processes: deionisation, reverse-osmosis, distillation, ozonation, ultraviolet light etc and some minerals are added to it. Filled into clear plastic bottles of varying volumes, this purified groundwater is then packed onto vans and trucks and driven to homes and offices all over Karachi.

A medium-sized water bottling company – selling eight to 10 different brands of water (coming from the same borehole on its premises) – will distribute around 1,000, bottles of different volumes per day, on average. On the other hand, an international brand, such as Culligan, states on its website that its Karachi factory has the capacity to produce 65,000 gallons of water, on average, per day.

That is a considerable amount of water being pumped out on a daily basis. If you think about the huge number of water factories dotting Karachi’s cityscape which pump water from underground, it may show that Karachi’s already meagre underground water resources are depleting fast. “There is no limit on boring for water,” says the manager of the Gulshan-e-Iqbal plant. “This is something very unregulated [in Karachi]. People are just boring into the ground and taking water out; there is no check on how much water they are drawing out,” says Ahmed.

According to him, before planning to extract water from aquifers, the rate of water recharge must be taken into account. On that basis, he says, water resource experts should allocate quotas for water extraction and also allocate zones from where this water can be taken out and utilised for the purpose of bottling.

Unregulated extraction of groundwater, coupled with high prices that the manufacturers of bottled water charge, mean that this sector needs regulation on both counts. “A new mechanism to specify certain conditions for the supply of bottled water needs to be put into motion,” says Ahmed.

“We may have to introduce policy interventions for creating regulatory control and checks, specifying standards for drinking water and also specifying conditions of its production, distribution and tariffs. That is where the role of the state will come in.”

Reverse progress

High-tech solutions to water shortage have succeeded only partially

By Veera Rustomji

“See, just as good as Nestlé,” Brigadier (retd) Masood Ahmed Khan, a senior director at Pak Oasis, a private company that specialises in providing access to clean water, heartily chuckles as he holds up a glass of water taken from the tap of a Reverse Osmosis (RO) plant located in Karachi’s Shireen Jinnah Colony. Situated opposite the Clifton branch of Dr Ziauddin Hospital, this unexpected marvel of technology is somewhat camouflaged behind tankers and the rubble heaped around it. While it is difficult to ignore the squalor of the area where the plant is operating, anyone visiting it will be instantly struck by its state-of-the-art machinery designed to produce clean water for the local residents.

The RO plant in Shireen Jinnah Colony is one of 18 such plants set up at a cost of 4.5 billion rupees in two different parts of Karachi – five in Lyari and 13 in Keamari, all installed and being run by Pak Oasis – with the accumulated capacity to provide 13 million gallons of water per day (MGD). The technology required to set up these plants is not available in Pakistan and is also very costly. Produced and sold on commercial basis, water from these plants will be too expensive for most of the residents of Lyari and Keamari, both of which are bracketed among the poorest neighbourhoods of Karachi. A financial and administrative system had to be devised to make the water produced by RO plants available to the people in these areas.

It was during its previous tenure (2008-2013) that the Pakistan Peoples Party’s provincial government decided to come up with the required financial and administrative system and planned to invest in the RO plants. While the provincial administration provided the money to set up the plants through its 2010 budget allocations, the smooth running of the plants was made the responsibility of the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board (KWSB) which was to pay Pak Oasis for running costs as well as provide electricity to the plants.

But it is here that a major problem cropped up. Shortage of electricity in the city has hit the working of RO plants since the KWSB is finding it difficult to run them with diesel-powered generators which are a highly costly option — according to a senior KWSB official, diesel-powered generators cannot run for more than six hours a day due to the high costs involved. This means that most plants are not running at their original capacity. The one in Shireen Jinnah Colony, for instance, has never produced to its full capacity of 500,000 million gallons of water per day (MGD) due to the unavailability of electricity throughout the day to keep the plant running. This is why residents of the apartment buildings just across the RO plant regularly call for water tankers to meet their requirements, acknowledges Mohammad Arif, chief engineer at KWSB. He also points out that RO plants, even when they are working at their full capacity, cannot meet all the water requirements in the areas where they are set up.

They can provide only a fraction of the total water required by the residents of Lyari and Keamari.

Besides the shortage of electricity, RO plants face other problems which erode their capacity over time. Since these plants get water for filtration by boring deep into the ground, they cause a consistent drop in the underground water level in the areas where they are situated, says Khan of Pak Oasis. The deeper the water table gets, the more energy it requires to extract. Additionally, the multilayered filtration technology used in RO plants means that they need to extract much more water from the underground than they deliver to the consumers. “Basically, for every one glass of clean water, five have to be extracted,” says Major (retd) Ghulam Mujtaba, the administrative head at Pak Oasis.

Separating salt from water

The other technology-intensive solution that some parts of the city are trying to employ in their efforts to tackle water shortages is the setting up of water desalination plants which use seawater as their raw material. The most talked about of such projects is the one set up by the Pakistan Naval Academy which provides 7,500 gallons of desalinated water every day to the cadets, their instructors and other staff.

Karachi, however, also offers what is perhaps the biggest failure story of a water desalination plant in our part of the world: the DHA Cogen Limited (DCL). The plant was originally seen as a two-in-one solution for water and electricity requirements of the Defence Housing Authority (DHA). When in February 2008, then President Pervez Musharraf inaugurated the plant in a gleaming ceremony, it was expected to produce 94 megawatts of electricity and approximately three MGD of desalinated water.

“The DHA was enthusiastic about this project because of the scarcity of water,” says a former member of the DHA board.

On April 17, 2008, the plant finally got into gear in the presence of dozens of DHA officials and residents but before they could leave they were informed that the plant was to be closed down immediately because of technical problems related to its filter.

Rumours soon started doing the rounds that Siemens, the German company that manufactured the plant, had actually provided DHA a plant which had been used elsewhere and failed. There was a second failed attempt to run the plant in August 2009 but since then the DHA and DCL administrations have been unable to resolve the technical problems afflicting it.

In recent years, those with investment stakes in the plant have also started squabbling over its ownership with the result that, according to the latest media reports, the banks which lent the money for the project are now suing the company to get their money back. “It is highly unfortunate that no resolution has been achieved [of the problems DCL has been facing],” says the former DHA board member.

Disgruntled and disappointed, DHA residents now want the authorities to invest elsewhere to overcome water shortages in their area. They are also not happy with the 2008-2009 agreement between DHA and KWSB under which the latter is providing the former with nine MGD of water in bulk supply. The residents complain that KWSB supply never surpasses six MGD even though the actual requirement of water for DHA, excluding its Phase 8, according to a United Nations report, could be as high as 14 MGD.

“Why not put money into building our own pipeline from the same source which the KWSB uses to derive water?”

asks Asad Kizilbash, a DHA resident. Such jumping from one failed project to the next fancy idea, is “an episodic approach to manage water resources” which “in the long run [could be] suicidal” suggests Erum Sattar, a doctoral student at the Harvard Law School who is studying management and control of water and land resources in the Indus Basin. She further adds: “It is critical for a society to manage its water resources responsibly with a view to the long-term impact and sustainability of projects and institutions.”

As the DCL’s case suggests, such sense of responsibility is yet to take root among the designers of policies and the makers of decisions — in Karachi as well as in the rest of the country.

Green Menace

Vegetables grown with Karachi's untreated waste water are a massive health hazard

By Saman Ghani Khan

There are few places right in the middle of Karachi where one can look outside the window and see green pastures dotted with trees for hundreds of acres. Shah Faisal Colony, Block 5, is one of such exceptional localities lined along the Malir river basin. “How many people do you know who wake up to this every morning?” says Masood Raza, a 33-year-old television journalist, whose house stands at the edge of the residential area where urban bungalows abruptly end and cultivated fields begin.

Lying adjacent to Mehran Naval Base, just south of Jinnah International Airport, this neighbourhood flanks the Malir River for about 20 kilometres before it meets the ocean. Raza’s family moved here 50 years ago. He remembers playing football in the open fields behind his house and taking dips in the river water that used to inundate the basin during the flooding season.

The change in the scenery has been dramatic since then. Open fields are now lush green vegetable farms as far as one can see. But the olfactory transformation of the areas has been nothing less than traumatic. As Raza walks through sludge where once fresh river water flowed, the rancid and familiar odour of sewage dominates the air. An elaborate waste water irrigation system runs along vast stretches of vegetable beds and animal fodder fields where once a gleaming river existed. “Twenty years ago pools of sweet drinking water would collect here, annually. It was so clear you could see to the bottom,” Raza says.

Nourished by the city’s sewage and industrial waste from nearby Korangi and Landhi areas, vegetables that emerge from this reeking sludge are surprisingly green and deceptively healthy-looking. To the unsuspecting eye, the produce of the area, which include spinach, tori (ridge gourd), green chilli, and karela (bitter gourd), appear perfectly normal — even attractive.

There is something unappetising about associating food with human waste. It is also a serious public health hazard. Vegetables grown with untreated waste water are toxic and have been proven, several times over, to be unfit for human consumption. Not only is the sale of these vegetables unethical but it is also illegal. Section 273 of the Pakistan Penal Code clearly states that it is a punishable offence to sell any food or drink item which is “noxious”, or unfit for people to consume. The Pure Food Ordinance 1960 also holds a seller responsible for supplying foods, including raw vegetables, which are poisonous.

The only pools of water that exist in this part of the Malir basin today have a sickly green and blackish colour that even the birds and insects stay clear of. Two large pipes jut out from the ground and white foam collects at the opening, as a seemingly endless supply of waste flows out from the pipes, causing the rocks around them to take on a peculiar red colour. “Have you ever seen a rock of this colour?” asks Raza.

These pipes are part of an innovative irrigation system. Sewage lines that transport the city’s untreated waste to the Malir River have been blocked and pumps have been installed to divert the waste water flowing through those pipelines – considered fertile, cheap and available – to a rectangular system of canals that criss-cross the fields. Somebody has gone through a lot of trouble to set all this up.

With assured year-round supply in a city where water is scarce, waste water irrigation has the added benefit of higher cropping intensities, with twice as much yield compared to fields irrigated with normal water. With insufficient food regulation, poor monitoring and law enforcement and, in many cases, murky land ownership, it is easy to understand why someone would try to exploit the situation at the cost of public health.

Whose land is it anyway?

Two young men on a motorcycle appear out of nowhere in the middle of the green chilli pasture and park at a short distance from where Raza is standing. They are not farmers. “Don’t worry; everyone knows who I am around here. They are probably just keeping watch,” says Raza.

He then approaches an old man by the name of Chaudhary who is taking refuge under a tree from the scorching summer sun. Chaudhary has been tending to this land before Raza was even born. “These are poor farmers [Chaudhary and others working on the fields nearby] who get a small percentage of sales. This land is actually owned by the government and the Pakistan Air Force (PAF). Shouldn’t the landowner be held responsible [for the poisonous produce grown in the farms]?”

“Growing vegetables using waste water from Malir River is illegal,” says Zubair Channa, the deputy commissioner of Korangi Town. He also shares a report with the Herald on the cultivated land behind Shah Faisal Colony. According to the document, at least 105 acres owned by the Revenue Department have been rented out to one Safdar Shah, who is a deputy superintendent of police in Sukkur. He has then rented it out to smaller contractors who farm the land. Channa is clear that a third party cannot rent out government land, unless they are encroaching.

Visiting the area, one finds out that the acreage where illegal cultivation is taking place is much larger than just 105 acres that find mention in Channa’s report. A few hundred acres of land are owned by the PAF and are leased out to Shah for “agricultural purposes”, a PAF official requesting anonymity, tells the Herald.

Shah, surprisingly, denies having anything to do with “a single yard” of the land near Shah Faisal Colony, Block 5.

Jamil Ahmed Balouch, additional director Land Acquisition Cell of Karachi Metropolitan Corporation’s Karachi Development Authority Wing, has an entirely different take on who actually owns the land. “The air force may claim it owns some of the land [near Shah Faisal Colony] but this land belongs to the Sindh Government’s Revenue Department and the air force has no right to rent it out,” he says. According to Balouch, who has also served as deputy director of land in Korangi, the PAF may be claiming ownership of the land because it was once allowed to use it as a firing range (around the time of Partition).

An old story

Waste water irrigation to grow vegetables in the city is not a new phenomenon in Pakistan. It has been practiced in many cities since the mid-1970s and early 1980s, according to a 2004 nationwide assessment of waste water by the International Water Association.

The farms running along Shah Faisal Colony form only a small percentage of the total cultivated area in Karachi where waste water is being used. A 2013 study by the Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (Suparco) that measured the toxicity of vegetables grown in the Malir river basin identified 10,000 acres of cultivated land where this practice is taking place. Dr Mubarak Ahmed, director general at the Pakistan Agriculture Research Council (PARC), estimates that close to 10 per cent of Karachi’s residents are exposed to these vegetables, especially those living near where they are cultivated.

In 2012, Sindh Minister for Environment Sheikh Muhammad Afzal calculated that about 25 per cent to 30 per cent of the city’s vegetables were grown with waste water. His figures include produce grown using waste water from the Lyari River, which is now reduced to a sewage drain. A well-known haven for vegetable farms that draw water from the polluted Lyari river closer to the city’s south-western coastline is the area aptly known as Gutter Baghicha (Gutter Garden). Like Shah Faisal Colony, this land is also surrounded by controversy. Officially it comes under the Karachi Municipal Corporation but the people growing vegetables here have all encroached upon it.

A waste water treatment plant near Gutter Baghicha, one of three in the city, is supposed to remove harmful pathogens from the waste water before it is dumped into the drain. There are, however, conflicting reports about whether this plant is functional. Official figures from the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board (KWSB) show that, even if it were functional, it runs at less than half its optimum capacity. With more than 2000 factories located in the neighbouring SITE area, the treatment plant is of little use in reducing toxins in waste water.

Not fit for human consumption

“The only way to be safe from harmful food is to grow vegetables in your backyard and keep a cow for milk,”

Raza says.

Vegetables absorb heavy metals from polluted soil and water, thus contaminating the food chain at all levels. While water in the Malir River is relatively safe further upstream from Shah Faisal Colony, once it flows down towards Quaidabad and further south, a large portion of the city’s untreated sewage and industrial waste mixes with its water to form a dangerous cocktail that not only contains harmful pathogens from human waste, but toxic elements as well.

Suparco’s study found that some vegetables grown in 20 farms along the Malir riverbanks near Mehran Town, Quaidabad, Shah Faisal Colony, Malir, Qayyumabad, F-Colony – to name a few areas – contained concentrations of heavy metals well above the permissible levels set by World Health Organisation and the Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Certain heavy metals such as lead, the study points out, can be toxic or poisonous even in small concentrations. In excess, elements like cadmium, copper, chromium and iron can lead to a host of health problems such as kidney failure, weakened bones, cancer, diarrhoea, stomach cramps, fatigue, loss of weight and high blood pressure. High levels of lead and zinc have been documented to disrupt the nervous system and even cause brain damage.

Even if the industrial waste is excluded from the waste water, untreated sewage will still be unfit for irrigation purposes. Sahar Aman, a microbiologist at PARC, says certain invasive bacteria present in sewage can be absorbed by the crop — although the health risk such bacteria may cause are much smaller compared to heavy metal contamination.

“These toxins (heavy metals) affect various bodily functions but they do not affect everyone in the same way, so it is hard to quantify their impact,”

says Dr Abbas Bhatti, a senior scientist at PARC, who led a PARC team which studied crops found along the banks of the Malir River. Their findings, which preceded Suparco’s research, found similar toxicity trends.

Suparco’s report compares the toxicity levels of vegetable crops grown near the Malir River with those randomly selected from the city’s vegetable market which gets more than 90 per cent of the vegetables cultivated with safe water. The results show a stark contrast between the two.

This is not to say that Suparco did not find any toxic samples from the vegetable market. Indeed, the Herald’s enquiries at the market, reveal that vegetables being supplied from here are not completely safe. Several vendors say they get their produce from Malir, depending on the season, not specifying which area in Malir. One prominent seller, known as the king of leafy vegetables, is reluctant to reveal the irrigation methods of some of his suppliers at first, but later, he says that vegetables from Gutter Baghicha, such as spinach, sometimes make their way to the market.

“Farmers have no choice but to use sewage or mixed water due to limited water supply,”

he says.

The market, however, is a tricky place to get credible information from sellers about their produce. In a place where hundreds of vendors sell the same product under one roof, competition is intense and for an outsider to decipher if a person is being honest is challenging, to say the least.

Public awareness

Raza is not only concerned as a citizen and consumer but also as a journalist working for one of the country’s biggest television news channels, Geo News. He feels it is his job to highlight the issue. “It is completely unethical,” he says.

His news coverage of toxic vegetables, in February 2012, raised red flags for many consumers as well as public representatives. Roshan Ali Sheikh, the then commissioner of Karachi, was jolted into taking action. He gave orders to bulldoze hundreds of acres of crops along the banks of the Malir River, publicly vowing to continue doing so until the practice was eliminated from the city. One month after Raza’s report was aired, several legislators tried to pass a resolution in the Sindh Assembly against the use of toxic water, as it was clearly a public health hazard.

Dr Abid Husnain, chairman of the Department of Food Science and Technology at the University of Karachi, is among many other people who have tried to raise public awareness on the issue. He believes toxic vegetables will continue to make their way to our homes in the absence of concerned agencies, especially the government, taking responsibility and implementing the laws in place to protect the public.

The blame game

With conflicting reports on who owns the fertile, yet environmentally compromised land, behind Shah Faisal Colony, efforts to remove toxic vegetable farms become less straightforward.

“It is our responsibility to stop the illegal cultivation of toxic vegetables,” says Channa, as he acknowledges that monitoring and keeping record of these practices is a major problem.

“I could take a bulldozer now and get rid of these crops, but there will be so many agencies, who may or may not have a stake in the land, that will stand in my way,”

he explains.

While it may be the city administration’s job to stop the cultivation of poisonous vegetables, other agencies can also play a role by streamlining their own functions. The KWSB, at least on paper, has the authority to remove installations of illegal pumps from its sewage pipes. Zahid Husain, the KWSB’s superintending engineer for Shah Faisal Town, recalls several futile attempts made by the board’s personnel with the support of the city’s administration to remove illegal cultivation of crops using waste water. “Whenever we remove an illegal water pump, it comes back shortly afterwards. We have nobody to hold responsible in these situations, as there is no contact person on site,” he says.

According to the KWSB’s website, only two of its three waste water treatment plants are working and they are processing around 11 per cent of the city’s sewage at Gutter Baghicha and Mauripur. More than 400 million gallons of waste water are being dumped untreated into the rivers – and, ultimately, into the ocean – everyday.

Standing on the balcony of the fourth floor of his home, Raza can see farmers preparing for the new crop on the fields where the authorities had once taken ‘action’. He regrets that the practice of using toxic water to irrigate vegetables is unlikely to stop. “There is a lot of money at stake,” he says.

Published in the Herald Magazine's August 2014 issue.