Immense Water Crisis in Pakistan!

In fact, water sector is repeatedly ignored by successive governments and due to that, Pakistan is also rapidly losing its legitimate water share of Rivers under Indus Basin Treaty. Due to that, severe effects have started to appear in our society like depletion of water level in cities grounds, lack of water in canals and rapid drying of Rivers. All these are consequences of Pakistan Govt. negligence. 

Provision of pure water to all the people by the government is not only a basic need and precondition for a healthy life but it is also a vital human right of all the people which mustn’t be ignored at any cost. The whole structure of human life revolves round it. In Pakistan, the unconstrained and more than needed population detonation has heightened the need to ensure constant access to improved drinking water supply especially in mega cities like Karachi and Lahore where traces of multiple deadly fundamentals including the human feces are reported by laboratory reports. This shows height of criminal neglect exhibited by the civic bodies towards public right of safe drinking water.

Water is accepted in Islamic teachings as an essential source of life; of which, everybody has the right to a fair share. According to a Hadith, it was stated by the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) “Muslims have common share in three things: grass, water and fire”. Moreover, the Holy Quran has also warned the human beings against unfair distribution of common goods and Islamic scholars agree that Islam forbids unfair assumptions, exploitation and uneven earnings of common goods like water.

 It is reported in the media many times that the global water shortage of affordable and safe drinking water is conspicuously visible in Pakistan with an estimated 44 percent of the total population is without any access to safe drinking water. This scarcity of clean drinking water can be more visibly seen in rural areas where up to 90 percent of the inhabitants may lack such access. On the other side, only three percent of Pakistan’s sweet water resources are used for household purposes and drinking. As one warning of the high-scale of the drinking problem prevalent in our society and the public ignorance of it, it is anticipated that more than 2.5 lac infant children die of diarrheal diseases every year.

Bottled water, it may be noted, should not be taken as an appropriate replacement to a sufficient service of tap-water as due to the lack of it, ill fated buyers are forced to use bottled water. During the past thirty years, use of bottled water is increasingly moved up the world over, as it has become a global phenomenon. Bottled water sector, despite its excessively high price compared to tap water, is measured as one of the powerful sectors of all the food and beverage trade as its consumption increases by an average of 12% every year. Government has termed the bottled water market, with 33 million liters of consumption per annum in 2009 & still the ratio is growing by a multiplication factor.