Ali* lives in one of Islamabad’s katchi abadis — the 63 unplanned, informal settlements scattered throughout dark pockets of the glistening capital. Like a mirror not to be looked into, Islamabad seems to move around these settlements in a state of permanent avoidance.

In fact, the abadi is so unwanted that its residents requested anonymity, to avoid incurring the wrath of the police, Capital Development Authority (CDA) or any other institution that feels irked by their demand for a fundamental right: water.

This particular abadi is located in a shock of green — low-lying trees surrounded by the manicured grey and brown of Islamabad’s planned sectors. It has a feature common to so many of the capital’s slums: a stream running through it, neatly dividing the houses of mud, tin and cloth into two. Piles of garbage and plastic abound. Small pathways weave through the sheds, connecting nearly 100 households to one another — still a small abadi by regular standards.

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Ali is nearly 40 and was born here. He says the settlement has existed long before his birth, but nobody seems quite certain exactly how long. As abadis go, there is an obvious dearth of basic facilities or even proximal access to them, with something as fundamental as a water connection missing.

There is a chasmic gap between the demand for water and its supply in the capital city. And the politics around who gets it and how, and who gets to make the decisions around it, are clearly manifested in the age-old anti-poor and exclusionary approach to Islamabad’s urban planning and infrastructure development…

Ali nonchalantly explains the makeshift arrangement that sustains 100 households. “Our only source of water is — I don’t want to use the word ‘beg’ — to borrow from our more affluent neighbours,” he says, settling down on the mud floor of his house. “They all have boreholes, so some of them are kind enough to open up a tap for a couple of hours and our women and children line up with buckets and bottles.”

It means they have to maintain good relationships with everyone, he says with a smile. “Many of us work in their houses — sometimes without pay, sometimes on daily wages. Some just keep our children at home to play with their children. There is never any demarcated work or timings. We just do whatever we must to avoid trouble and make sure our water isn’t turned off.”

MAKING DO AD-HOC

There is a public water filtration plant in the vicinity, but not within walking distance. So, if ever the borrowed supply falters, one of them lends a kid their motorcycle and sends him off to fetch a few buckets.

In the absence of any formal facility, the stream is also the only available mechanism for solid and liquid waste management. The trash is collected, buried, and inevitably carried away by the water when it floods. The washrooms are a makeshift collection of bricks with a plastic pipe to carry waste into the stream. The few times they tried digging a well, they got to the water quickly but the smell and taste gave it away as septic.

An entirely different set of problems arise when the rains hit. “Our houses are damaged every year, but we’re hidden in a ditch in the trees so nobody finds out,” says Ali. “My own house has been washed away by the stream at least twice. During the 2001 flood, in fact, we lost all our belongings as well as our documentation, which caused a huge problem for us.”

Where the state has abdicated responsibility, though, the residents of the abadi have come together as a community. During the torrential monsoon rains, young boys create barriers with sacks of mud and two men sit guard all night to warn everyone in case the water rises too far. And yet, Ali says, they have lost at least three children to the stream when it rages between their homes.

POLITICAL PROPS

“Every politician of Islamabad has visited this abadi and each one has promised water. The only time anybody seems to care about us is when they see us as a potential constituency,” says Ali.

“We’re illiterate, but even we knew that the local government did not have any authority to deliver — they could barely get their own salaries released. And the truth is, no resident of any katchi abadi has the means or access to make demands of the CDA.”

There are some settlements — such as those located in the wealthier sectors of F-6 and F-7 — that have received water supply. But this seems to come down to an arbitrary decision by the CDA about which abadis they want to recognise.

“They know we’re here,” says Ali, “We’ve even had to gather funds in the past to pay them off so they don’t demolish our abadi. We’ve applied for a water connection, we’ve agreed to pay the bills, to even pay for the pipes. We don’t want charity. We just want to live with dignity.”

But dignity seems too much to ask for in a city where the poor are routinely treated with contempt and suspicion.

“When everyone around you relinquishes responsibility for your well-being,” Ali says, “Every aspect of society tells you that you’re unwanted, that they’re just quietly waiting for you to be washed away. How does one provide water to someone they would rather pretend doesn’t exist?”

WATER AND GOVERNANCE

Ali’s sentiments point to a deeper truth about how power is distributed in Islamabad. Under the gleaming façade of order and progress, lies an underbelly of disorder and inequity. As the capital, Islamabad represents some of the worst failures of urban water governance in Pakistan. However, as a planned city, it also presents the most fertile ground to experiment with solutions, lest it become a modern-day Fatehpur Sikri.

The city receives water from three surface sources: Simly, Khanpur and Rawal dams, with a supply of roughly 24 million gallons daily (MGD), nine MGD, and two MGD, respectively. In addition to this, around 28 MGD is supplied through 195 public tube-wells. When combined, this makes for a supply of between 60 and 70 MGD.

The demand for water — according to outdated estimates by the CDA which have not taken the burgeoning population into account — is 220 MGD. The chasmic gap of nearly 150 MGD is met through private tube-wells and tankers, or simply left unmet. Despite the fact that CDA laws actually prohibit the use of both private tube-wells and tankers, it is a law which cannot be practically enforced, given the circumstances.

With unchecked usage and a lack of data on private tube-wells, groundwater in the capital has been depleting at alarming levels. A recent study estimated that the water table had dropped by 24 feet between 2013 and 2017.

This is corroborated by a United Nations (UN) Habitat report from 2014, which claimed that groundwater was receding by an astounding 6.5 feet per annum. Anecdotal evidence as well as expert predictions now indicate that tube-wells may begin drying up in a matter of years instead of decades.

This alarming state of affairs has not gone entirely unnoticed by the city administration. In 2020, the CDA had earmarked Rs450 million for repairs and maintenance to fix leaking and broken pipelines, tube-wells and tankers, whereas drinking water filtration plants have been increased from 85 to 103.

The Pakistan Council for Research on Water Resources has initiated a laudable project to establish 100 groundwater recharge wells. Interestingly, though, there has been no serious attempt at rainwater harvesting — despite the fact that Islamabad receives higher-than-average rain of 1,300mm and that CDA by-laws actually mandate rainwater harvesting for houses larger than 400 sq. yards.

The “real” solution, that has always captivated administrators and politicians alike, lies elsewhere. The proposal to lay down a pipeline to the twin cities from Ghazi-Barotha Dam on the Indus, 60 kilometres away, has been floated and shelved several times.

This project would deliver 100 MGD each to both cities in its first phase — with capacity to expand further — and has been touted as the ultimate fix to the capital’s water woes. The delays in its execution have meant its cost has skyrocketed, from Rs37 billion in 2007 to an estimated Rs200 billion if it were initiated today.

But not everyone is sold on the dream of Ghazi-Barotha.

Hydrologists, policy experts and journalists have criticised the CDA’s obsession with megaprojects which provide visibility and political mileage at great social, economic and environmental expense. Instead of focusing on resolving long-term structural and administrative problems, there is an urge to resort to one large “fix” of creating a new supply line from a fourth river.

It is undeniable that the capital faces an acute water shortage, especially for a city growing at this pace. However, it is a crisis of management arguably brought about by the CDA’s own doing, which exacerbates an already critical situation.

THREE MANIFESTATIONS OF A WATER CRISIS

A water crisis can take as many shapes and forms as water itself. But three aspects of this intensifying disaster in Islamabad can help better contextualise the issue. The first being, interestingly, what happens when you have too much water instead of none?

The most recent catastrophe took place on July 28, 2021, when a cloudburst caused parts of the city to receive up to 330 millimetres of rain in a matter of hours. Sector E-11 saw its streets turn into rivers, carrying vehicles and damaging property, while one woman and her seven-year-old son drowned in their submerged basement.

A subsequent hydrological study of the sector revealed that “the natural hydrology and flow paths were extensively modified.” A stream which is 100 feet wide before it enters E-11, for instance, is suddenly reduced to 18 feet, whereas others have been narrowed to under 10 feet, with their sides paved, drastically reducing their natural drainage capacity.

In a similar cloudburst on July 23, 2001, Islamabad received a record-breaking 620 millimetres of rainfall in 10 hours. However, it was neighbouring Rawalpindi which witnessed the deaths of at least 35 people and the destruction of about 3,000 homes, mostly in slums along the Nala Lai — a stream cutting across Rawalpindi which is fed by several smaller tributaries flowing through Islamabad.

This is why, in his 2005 paper, Dr Daanish Mustafa blamed the increased concretisation of Islamabad for the creation of an urban “hazardscape” in Rawalpindi — diminishing the absorption capacity of the ground and drastically increasing surface runoff.

The existence of slums along the streams of the capital, then, is not an optimum real estate choice. Islamabad’s master plan is often critiqued for not incorporating sufficient low-income housing and, in fact, insisting on treating the overlapping issues of water, housing and transport separately.

It is for this reason that the only option left for the city’s poor are “illegal” and “encroached” pockets along the tributaries of Nala Lai. The bias against Islamabad’s poor may show in the blame for encroachment, but the actual violence is in the very plan of the city, which allows space for some and not others.

QUALITY OF WATER

The second essential aspect of this crisis manifests itself in the quality of available water. Over the years, numerous studies have been conducted in the twin cities, with nearly each one concluding that the water is “heavily loaded with microbial growth” and with “traces of arsenic and heavy metals” far above minimum safety standards.

One reason for this is the dumping of waste — both domestic and commercial upstream, and industrial and medical downstream — into the 26 or so streams flowing through the city.

These streams were originally intended to recharge groundwater and drain stormwater, but eventually began to be used for sewage instead. This is despite the fact that most of Islamabad’s planned housing sectors have access to sewerage systems, unlike its urban slums. The host of preventable illnesses and deaths this brings is reflected in a 2020 survey, which reveals that nearly 60 percent of residents in the low-income neighbourhood of Nurpur had suffered from an infection in the past three months due to waterborne diseases.

To counter this, Islamabad received its first sewage treatment plant (STP) in 2009 with German funding of Rs2.72 billion. Unfortunately, the STP sputtered to a close in 2016 with federal auditors claiming “millions had been wasted” on it, before being reopened with vigour in 2021. At present, it continues to operate at less than half of its 17 MGD capacity, due to pipeline leakages that spill the other half of sewage into the city’s streams.

“There is a popular consensus among the upper classes of Islamabad that the abadis are the source of all this waste,” Dr Mustafa argues. “But where does the liquid waste from all their affluent households go? If anything, one upper class residence probably generates waste equal to 20 slum households.”

POLITICS OF PROVISION

Finally, the third aspect of Islamabad’s water crisis pertains to the politics of provision. Some quick statistics to contextualise this: Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) has a population of two million, roughly split evenly between rural and urban. According to a 2020 UNICEF report, 38 percent of this urban one million lives in slums or underserved areas, of whom only 27 percent receive public water supply.

This disparity is equally pronounced between ICT’s urban and rural residents. However, in reality, the CDA is often even unable to provide water connections to its own new sectors such as I-14, I-15 and I-16, each of which are either already “developed” or nearing completion, and none of which have access to water.

Compounding this problem is the lack of a water metering system, without which the administration is left in the dark as to piped water usage. This means that those with both excessive and minimal use are charged nearly the same meagre fee.

As of 2020, there were also around 60 private housing societies in Islamabad. Neither the CDA nor the ICT administration provides water connections to them or regulates their usage of groundwater, effectively relinquishing control of the common water table to housing corporations.

In the absence of regulation, anyone who can afford to install a tube-well and pay the exorbitant electricity bills of pumping water is doing so. While domestic tube-wells in affluent households are used for horticulture, shallow dug wells in poorer neighbourhoods have dried up and drinkable water originally at 50 feet is now found at 300 feet.

A complicated question is the one regarding private boreholes, which remain legally banned and yet openly used as the city’s primary water source. The need to regulate these seems obvious at first, given the fast-depleting water table. On the other hand, doing so without providing an alternate source for water is also acknowledged as an impossibility.

In the absence of both regulation and alternative sources, water extraction becomes a race to the bottom, where those with resources have the power to impact a water table mutual to everyone.

Moreover, this deprivation is not uniform — impacting women, children and vulnerable segments within these societies more than others. At each step, the most powerless of Islamabad shoulder the highest burden and blame: they are expected to refrain from encroaching without being provided shelter, from polluting without being provided a sewerage system, and from drilling boreholes without being provided water.

QUESTIONS OF WATER, QUESTIONS OF POWER

There are myriad perspectives that can be adopted to answer questions about water, given its ubiquitousness. The most common one is to take the technocratic approach: view water as an important element of governance, propose methods to conserve its supply and usage, incorporate technology in the process, and, increasingly, make a connection to larger questions of climate change. A messy problem with a neat solution.

However, it’s also true that any analysis of a basic human right is incomplete until we consider one core perspective: power. Questions of water are fundamentally political questions that ask: who gets to make which decisions for whom?

So, who has power over water in Islamabad? How does this power manifest itself? Who gets impacted most by these decisions? And do they have any means of holding decision-makers accountable?

Such answers are, predictably, never uncomplicated. But in the case of Islamabad it may be argued that they can be summed up by one conflict which has determined local governance dynamics more than any other in recent years: the CDA vs Metropolitan Corporation of Islamabad (MCI).

To better understand this, a brief history seems pertinent.

BUREAUCRACY VS LOCAL GOVERNMENT

Islamabad’s much-anticipated first attempt at a municipal election came in 2015 — almost half a century after the city’s founding in 1967. Sheikh Anser Aziz of PML-N took office as mayor and chairman of the MCI — an electoral college comprising 50 union councillors representing all areas of the ICT.

The vision for the MCI was for it to serve as the apex governance body in the city, with the CDA and ICT administration transitioning to the role of bureaucratic implementation arms.

This positioning of MCI necessitated the stripping away of certain powers from the CDA — an institution which has existed longer than Islamabad itself and considers the capital as somewhat of a birthright.

According to the former mayor, CDA had to give up full control of 23 and partial control of 26 directorates — including water and sanitation — along with transferring 11,000 of its 18,500 staff. The inevitable resistance this prompted from the authority ranged from passive measures, such as stalling and politicking, to actively unionising and filing court cases.

What made this situation worse for the MCI was the lack of legislative or regulatory support due to massive lacunae in the Islamabad Local Government Act 2015. With a funding mechanism routed through the CDA and not even an office to its name, the newly-formed local body was left entirely at the mercy of external forces.

Over the next four years, the CDA would put up fierce resistance to the MCI, enough to “destroy any chances of it being successful”, according to Aziz. Once the federal government changed and the administrative rivalry turned into political opposition, one directorate after another was reinstated to the CDA, including water and sanitation.

In October 2020, Sheikh Anser Aziz handed in his resignation and Islamabad’s brief tryst with local government came to an end.

This process has left the city in exactly the same position as earlier: with a bureaucratic institution indubitably in charge. Dr Mustafa terms the CDA “a white elephant”, the very structure of which seems to necessitate a mindset of centrality and power. He claims this entitlement makes them diametrically opposed to an empowered local government and unable to digest the thought of “some public representative from rural Islamabad” making decisions.

The CDA has remained committed to an archaic master plan, while simultaneously encouraging the rampant commodification of land. The former may be attributed to a lack of imagination, but the latter is a structural issue, since the development and selling of Islamabad’s land is the primary source of income and power for the authority. This could also speak to CDA’s enthusiasm for megaprojects and creating new solutions to old problems rather than addressing systemic issues.

Interviews with CDA officials, who requested anonymity, reveal that the institution possesses a sense of self-righteousness as an executive free from “political interference”. The top-down flow of power means they are answerable only upwards, leading the authority down some reprehensible pathways. Just a few examples of this are the demolition of 2,000 households in the Afghan camp in I-11, or the proposed demolition of 1,400 houses in Rimsha Colony in H-9 to make space for a highway.

The question remains: why does this matter for water?

DEMOCRATISING DECISION-MAKING

At first glance, the link with local governments may seem theoretical. However, the democratisation of water inevitably requires a democratisation of decision-making over water.

This is not to say that the creation of a local government is the final solution to the woes of the disempowered. On the contrary, it is quite possible that an elected mayor may share the developmental views of the CDA. In fact, the city’s only mayor was frequently accused of pursuing anti-poor policies and demolitions in the name of anti-encroachment.

However, building a democratic set-up is the beginning of a long-term solution; a first step which has the capacity to enable other steps.

Whereas it is nearly impossible to hold the CDA accountable for any misdeeds, a local government (LG) representative is made more answerable by fear of jeopardising their political future. The creation of local councils provides a platform for residents of all unnameable abadis to voice grievances over issues such as flooding, pollution, sewerage, water provision — issues a bureaucracy is not mandated to hear.

After a long hiatus, LG elections in Islamabad are around the corner again. However, the mere creation of this lowest tier and a transfer of visible power is not sufficient. An empowered LG will require political, administrative and financial cover under a foolproof local government act.

As long as this remains absent, decisions over fundamental human rights for the most powerless are relinquished to the all-powerful, with the hope of benevolence.

The writer is a journalist.

He tweets @dadamkhan.

*Name changed to protect privacy

Published in Dawn, EOS, December 11th, 2022