ABBOTTABAD: People of Abbottabad city have been facing acute water shortage from the last couple of days, as the local municipality and Public Health Engineering Department (PHED) failed to redress the problem in the ongoing month of Ramazan.

The worst-affected areas include Kunj Qadeem, Kunj Jadeed, Lower Kehal, Upper Kehal, Malikpura and Karimpura.

Sources said that over Rs4 billion had been spent on the drinking water supply scheme under a Japan-funded project.

They said that installation of pipelines and construction of water storage tanks had been completed and the scheme was handed over to PHED.

They said that the local municipality was collecting taxes from the residents while PHED had been assigned the job to supply water to the city.

Residents say local MPA not solving the problem

However, both the departments were engaged in a tug of war over some technical and administrative matters, which had been hampering water supply to the residents.

The residents said that they had repeatedly asked the local MPA, Mushtaq Ahmed Ghani, to help create a water board to manage the water supply issue, but no concrete step was taken so far.

Earlier, the municipal committee was providing water to the city through tube wells.

However, most of the tube wells would remain out of order. Sources said that these tube wells would have to be kept operational for use in emergency in case the gravity scheme was blocked with silt and mud during rain in the area.

PMDC REGISTRATION: Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PMDC) has been refusing to register 33 MPhil degree-holders of Khyber Medical College (KMC), Peshawar, who were awarded degrees by the University of Peshawar (UoP) during session 2009-10, sources said.

Initially, KMC was affiliated with UoP, but for the last few years it is affiliated with Khyber Medical University (KMU) for the undergraduate courses. The problem started when PMDC refused to give registration to the postgraduate scholars of KMC in different fields, including pathology, anatomy, physiology, etc, who had graduated from UoP.

As many as 33 candidates had passed MPhil in session 2009-10, but none of them had registration with PMDC.

Dr Haroon, one of the affected doctors, told media persons that PMDC had not been giving them registration though Forensic Medicine and Toxicology Department in KMC was the single best centre in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where all medicolegal work was being done.

The affected doctors have threatened to move the court if they were not granted registration.

Published in Dawn, July 5th , 2014