KARACHI: Despite significant progress on poverty reduction and reducing open defecation, the alarming state of water supply and sanitation in Pakistan still poses health hazards. Minors are particularly at risk, disclosed a new World Bank report released ahead of the World Toilet Day.
World Toilet Day is observed every year to emphasise on actions to ensure that everyone has a safe toilet by 2030, which is part of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 that covers sanitation and water. The day is being observed on Monday 19th November.
World Banks report titled ‘When Water Becomes a Hazard: A Diagnostic Report on The State of Water Supply, Sanitation and Poverty in Pakistan and Its Impact on Child Stunting’ states that Pakistan has made some improvement to counter open defecation in recent years but despite that serious threats to children in Pakistan including rates of diarrhea and stunting are still not properly countered.
The report stated that due to lack of proper municipal waste-water treatments, the surface and ground-water has been contaminated with bacterial contamination, therefore, rural areas, which already lack facilities suffer the most. The report further states that fecal waste contamination was also polluting surface soil and also in the irrigation used for agriculture.
The report further states that minor children are the worst victim of diarrhea, which eventually leads them to stunting.
Strengthening Participatory Organisation (SPO) Regional Coordinator Raheema Panhwar said that as per Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI)’s election manifesto, Prime Minister Imran Khan recently announced a countrywide cleanliness drive titled ‘Clean and Green Pakistan’ aimed at provision of clean drinking water, clean environment, proper sanitation, waste disposal system and construction of toilets at all public places in five years.
During the launch of the campaign, the prime minister said that 0.5 million children die in the country annually due to poor sanitation and unhygienic conditions.
Reacting over the report, UK based charity WaterAid-Pakistan’s policy and advocacy manager Nadeem Ahmad said that for Pakistani children stunting was a serious problem issue.
Talking to Daily Times, Ahmed said that most of the untreated sewage water was flowing in agricultural fields, which was not only polluting the food, but after seepage it was also contaminating ground-water, which was a major source of drinking water in many regions across Pakistan.
Talking about the solution, he said that the concept of central waste-water treatment has failed as it was costly and has running cost, therefore, most of the central waste-water treatment plants are non-functional. “Therefore, government has to adopt a decentralised waste-water treatment plants in all major cities and also make it mandatory to all new residential private colonies to set waste-water that can be later sold for agricultural purposes,” said Ahmed.