Shangla residents complain about contaminated water.

Byline: Umar Bacha

SHANGLA -- The Shangla residents have complained that they are contracting various water-borne diseases as water supplied to them often gets mixed with sewage due to passage of the pipelines through the drains.

Wakeel Khan, a local resident, said about 30 per cent of people of Bisham consumed water supplied to them from the Indus and Khan Khwar rivers, where the drains of the entire city got emptied.

He said drinking water was a basic life necessity, but due to lack of proper management, distribution and construction of water tanks at inappropriate places, a number of residents had been deprived of the fundamental right.

Meanwhile, sources told Dawn that over 190 government-run gravity water supply schemes across the district had a very faulty distribution system. Most of the lines, supplying water to Bisham, Puran, Chakesar, Shahpur and Karora, pass through the drains constructed along the roads, they added.

'Due to absence of a proper check, people take connections directly from the main supply lines, thus damaging them,' Shahid Khan, a worker of the public health engineering department, said, adding this allowed sewage to seep into the water pipelines.

Say most pipelines pass through drains causing drinking water to mix with sewage

Mian Raham Ghaffar, an environmentalist, said there was no mechanism for covering the water sources and that the pipelines were installed through the drains. He said cholera, typhoid, hepatitis and dysentery were the frequently reported diseases in Shangla due to consumption of unsafe and contaminated water.

It is to mention here that after the construction of tunnel for 17MW hydropower project in Karora, five natural springs in Donai have dried up, forcing people to get water from river.

The public health engineering department claims that it had conducted tests of the water samples, which showed that the commodity was safe for drinking.

Yousaf Khan, executive engineer of public health engineering, Shangla, said he...