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 That has led to plans by the Sindh provincial government to invest
5.4 billion Pakistani rupees ($53 million) in installing 750
solar-powered reverse osmosis water purification plants across the
sprawling desert district, to help get safe drinking water to the
region’s over 1.5 million people.
All of the facilities are expected to be set up and working by June
this year, the government said.
Residents living near a first plant, inaugurated in January in the
Misri Shah area of Mithi, the district headquarters of Tharparker,
say it is transforming life in the parched region, where vanishing
rain and drying groundwater supplies mean most available water is
now saline or too high in fluoride.
'HARDLY LESS THAN A MIRACLE'
"It is really hardly less than a miracle for us that we can now
drink sweet and clean water, for the first time in my entire life,”
said 45-year-old Rekha Meghwar of Mithi, as she turns on the water
plant’s tap to fill her pitcher.
Billed as the ‘Asia’s largest (by capacity) solar-powered water
purification plant’, the facility will treat 3 million gallons of
water daily, enough to meet the water needs of 300,000 people in
Mithi and in 80 adjoining villages, according to officials in the
Mithi town municipal office.
Constructed at a cost of 400 million Pakistani rupees or $4 million,
the plant is expected to particularly benefit women, who currently
often must fetch water from far-away hand-dug wells.
Sunita Bheel, a woman waiting in line for water from the new Mithi
plant, said women in the area often walk two kilometers a day to
fetch water from a hand-dug well owned by a landlord outside the
village.
EFFECT ON MIGRATION
Local people said having water available for themselves, and their
livestock, may stem increasing waves of migration from the area.
Anil Kumar, who lives in Morrey-Jee-Waand village, a few miles from
Mithi, said 80 percent of people in his village and in seven other
villages around it migrated last September to other areas in the
region with supplies of dam water in an effort to find potable water
for themselves and their livestock, and to seek jobs after crops
failed.
"But they are now gradually returning to their villages when they
learn about the sweet water (plant),” said the 65-year-old guar
farmer, who looks after the property and belongings of neighbors who
have migrated.
Today, Kumar rides every other day on his mule, strapped with two
empty 30-liter drums, to the filtration plant to bring back water,
he said.
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Access to useable water is a key problem in drought-hit Tharparkar.
Barely 5 percent of the population has access to clean and
disease-free potable water, according to a study by Dow University
of Health Sciences and the Pakistan Council for Scientific and
Industrial Research.
One reason for this has been worsening fluoride contamination of
underground water sources as less water recharges the drying system.
The study found that the fluoride level at many locations in
Tharparkar is at dangerous levels of over 13 mg/liter compared to
the 1 mg/liter considered normal.
Excessive fluoride intake, from sources with more than 1.5 mg/liter
of fluoride in the water, can cause problems such as bone
deformation, dental problems, and damage to the kidneys and thyroid.
NO RAIN, NO RIVERS
Tharparkar depends heavily on rain-fed ground water, as it has no
rivers. It receives an average annual rainfall between 200 and 300
millimeters, 80 percent of it during summer monsoon season, which
runs from July to September. The rainfall recharges groundwater that
must then last for the other three quarters of the year.
Since 2011, however, average annual rainfall each year has been less
than 50 percent of normal, straining further already depleting
groundwater resources, according to the Pakistan Meteorological
Department.
“Given the current grim state of water woes, establishment of water
purification plants is a welcome move,” said Abdul Hafeez, the
country manager at WaterAid – UK, a global water charity.
But water shortages in the area could be solved even more
effectively by tripling the amount of rainwater harvesting going on
in the district, he said.
(Reporting by Saleem Shaikh and Sughra Tunio; editing by Laurie
Goering)
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