The residents of federal capital would face water shortage in future as the Capital Development Authority (CDA) has been unable so far to start work on the much-awaited projects, including the Ghazi Barotha Water Supply Project (GBWSP) and replacement of decades-old supply systems.
On the other hand, the authority has launched a housing scheme while planning is going on for 10 new residential sectors. “Currently, the citizens are facing numerous problems due to water shortage, which will aggravate the crisis in the city if the CDA launched new sectors but failed to execute the GBWSP and replace the crippling supply system,” a senior CDA official said.
He said the CDA had recently launched a housing scheme while another one was on the cards and it was also planning more residential sectors. “It was the responsibility of the CDA’s bigwigs to resolve water shortage problems before initiating work on new housing schemes.”
He said the town planners also did not conduct a Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) of these housing projects. “The main purpose of EIA is to inform the decision-makers of the likely impacts of a proposal before reaching to a conclusion,” he added.
The official said the EIA provided an opportunity to the planners to identify key issues and stakeholders in the early stage of the project so that potentially adverse impacts could be addressed before final decisions were made. “The EIA mainly focus on proposed physical developments in water resource projects and large-scale industrial facilities,” he said.
The official said the situation was worsening as the CDA not only failed to replace the pipelines, which resulted in a wastage of around 50 percent of water, but the water supply by the tube-wells, each one originally designed to produce 400 to 500 gallons of water per minute had drastically reduce to 40 to 50 gallons due to decreasing water table. “The tube-wells cannot extract the required amount of water mainly because the water table has receded by almost 70 feet,” he said.
The CDA officials the existing sources of water for urban parts of Islamabad solely depended on rain and ground water. “The main water sources of Islamabad include Simly Dam on River Soan, Khanpur Dam on River Korang and tube-wells. The current supply of water is 60 MGD, while the requirement hovers around 115 MGD.”
According to the official, the CDA had prepared a proposal regarding replacement of water supply system. It planned to launch the project in 2009 and complete the work by 2012 on the basis of Engineering, Planning and Construction (EPC). “Lack of resources, forced the CDA to send the project to the EAD for provision of funds or to find a donor to finance the project. But the EAD has so far failed to arrange any donor,” he added.
Similarly, the GBWSP is still pending because the government and the CDA did not allocate a single penny for the project. “It was a responsibility of the CDA to give practical shape to these projects before launching of housing schemes in the city,” he said.
