SUSTAINABILITY-PAKISTAN: Water is Villagers’ Most Urgent Need

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Muddassir Rizvi

KARAK, Pakistan, Apr 15 2004 (IPS) - Residents in the Pakistani village of Pulosa here quickly identified water as their most urgent need, while preparing their area development plan with the help of a public interest group this month.

Located 25 kilometres from this town in North West Frontier Province near the border with Afghanistan, Pulosa is one of thousands of villages in the country facing a water shortage that has been getting more acute in recent years.

Piped water is available to only 30 percent of the country’s almost 150 million population, only in urban areas. People mostly rely on tube wells, hand pumps or freshwater reservoirs, and the situation becomes worse when rains are low.

“Per capita water availability has come down to around 1,00 cubic metres compared to 5,300 in 1950s,” says Asif Shujaa Khan, who heads the Pakistan Environmental Protection Agency. “The problems of access and quality are affecting rural and urban areas alike.”

But what is changing is growing public pressure on the government to provide clean drinking water.

In Pulosa in NWFP, people are demanding their right to clean water by setting up hand pumps, fed up with having to walk long distances to get water.

The village with a population of around 10,000 has only a few public sector water storages – called ‘talab’ in the native Pushto language – that are fed by either a nearby small dam. When these dry up, residents turn to tubewells in other villages through pipes.

“This is just insufficient. We have to walk miles to get our supplies of water. More than often, we have to wait for days on end for supplies, compelling us to ration our storages at home,” a resident said at the meeting to prepare the village development plan.

The plan was facilitated by Khwendo Kor – an organisation that since 1993 has been working in rural NWFP to educate conservative rural communities on issues that affect the lives of women. Khwendo Kor is a Pushto-language phrase that means ‘Sister’s Home’.

The organisation has already helped around 30 villages around Karak in preparing their development plans, all listing water as their topmost priority.

Roohi Tabassum, who is in charge of the organisation’s Karak office, says that in the first step of the group’s approach, Kor helps the village’s male and female organisations identify their needs and then put them into a development plan.

In the second stage, it facilitates their link with government line departments and elected local institutions to ensure that their priorities become part of the official development schemes. The third stage is follow-up, when communities constantly put pressure on authorities to provide their identified needs.

This approach has already led to the installation of more than 100 hand pumps in the organisation’s target villages over the past few years.

The increasing political pressure for access to clean water has also forced the government to approve two dams for the area. These dams will be constructed in the Changoz and Sharki areas of Karak district at a cost of 50 million U.S. dollars.

“The dams will enable the government to provide piped water to thousands of people for drinking purposes, as well as make water available for irrigation so that more lands could be cultivated,” said Shah Abdul Aziz, a cleric who represents Karak in the National Assembly.

These dams are being constructed under the government’s Drought Emergency Relief Assistance, funded by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.

But long-term plans are not enough to meet today’s urgent needs.

Tabassum says that although line departments and the local institutions have been trying to provide water through hand pumps, the ratio of these pumps to the population is still too low. “Water is still the most urgent issue in this region.”

Fazeelat Bibi, a women’s councillor from the area, also complains that people are deprived of access to a “drop of water” and still have to walk miles to fetch their daily supplies from community wells or hand pumps.

For her, piped water is an unthinkable luxury in these far-off mountainous areas of the province. “All people in these villages want is easy access through hand pumps not so far away from their homes. The issues of quality are secondary at this stage,” Bibi explained.

This lack of water as well as sanitation facilities is also increasing disease burdens borne by women and children. “Women are the most affected, as it is their responsibility to fetch water from long distances,” said Faheem Khattak, who looks after the health and hygiene education work of Khwendo Kor in Karak.

Most women in the area are already anaemic and malnourished. Carrying heavy loads of water on their heads, especially during the days of their pregnancies, result in antepartum haemorrhage. This means the placenta prematurely detaches itself from the wall of the uterus and results in vaginal bleeding, and causes stillbirths or abortions.

Scarcity of water also leads to poor sanitation and hygiene practices. Most women in the villages around Karak suffer from uterus infections and children from diarrhoea, worms and skin diseases.

Brackish water with high salt content is causing the increasing incidence of blood pressure in both males and females.

“We at Kor are endeavouring to educate communities on how to best use their available resources. Better hygiene practices and boiling of water minimise the incidence of many diseases,” says Khattak.

In the end, however, she says that her work is about changing people’s attitudes and practices.

“Change from the grassroots is a slow process and cannot be quantified,” she says. ”But what certainly is changing is that people are no more sitting back and waiting for somebody to come and help them. They are organised and mobilised to put the right pressure on the authorities to provide them their basic needs.”