World Water Week.

A special World Water Week is being held in Stockholm and Sweden. The aim is to seek and sift strategies to solve the growing problems of water, one of the most essential and crucial sources for survival and progress of civilisations. The gravity of water problems may be imagined by the dilemma that despite water being utterly indispensable for life, over 2.2 billion men, women, and children in the world-about 28 percent of its population-have no access to safe drinking water. This deprivation, particularly in the developing world, is the main cause of hunger, disease, lack of development and mounting poverty.

People in Pakistan can realise the paramount significance, dangers and dragonets of water problems as they have to endure a diabolical duo of its most ruthless and extremely antagonistic vagaries. They have to seek, search and suffer for its scarcity in clean drinking form. The country suffers from incurable droughts for irrigation as well as the destruction from relentless rains and onslaughts of urban floods. A survey recently revealed that 70 percent water in the country, including in its 24 major cities, is not fit for drinking while water in many districts of Balochistan and KP has almost finished. Finding it in some tribal and Thar areas is tremendously torturous. Overall supplies in the country plummeted to a water stressed category in the 1990s, fell even further to a scarce category in 2005 and is estimated to slip to an absolutely scarce slot in the future. Many will have to survive on the minimum average access of about 500 cubic meters per person in the next three years.

The extent for this gravity on global scale similarly may be further surmised by the concern that the world, since 1993, has been commemorating a Water Day on March 22 each year. Outside of this, special water weeks are now also organised for more intensive and extensive deliberations to revitalise the research, studies and strategies about various regions, sources, categories and aspects of water problems and their management. The current water week in Sweden is mostly devoted to the ground water sources that not only sustain the earth's ecosystem but also provide about a half of all drinking, 40 percent of crop irrigation and a third of the industrial requirements around the world. Besides it also maintains the beauty, basins and flow of rivers and serves as the land's barrier and bulwark against erosion and seawater encroachments.

Ground water has a far...