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Water sparkles at a luxury golf club and water resort just off Multan Road. The environment inside its premises is rarefied – meticulously manicured lawns, well-maintained golf greens and artificial sandpits are lined by diligently designed tree plantations. Water sport facilities are interspersed over a large area. The clear blue sky above the resort and the crystal clear water raining down from what its management calls a “splash zone” belie its surroundings. It is located amid one of the most heavily industrialised – and also highly polluted – tracts of land near Lahore. Factories and plants of all types emit poisonous smoke and spew dangerous waste right around the bucolic atmosphere of the resort. Groundwater in the area is poisonous, the land is singed with chemicals and the air noxious with hazardous fumes.
Located about 36 kilometres south of Lahore’s Thokar Niaz Beg flyover, this area was agricultural country before industry arrived here in the 1990s. Rice, vegetable, wheat, sugarcane and many other crops grew here in abundance. Soon after industrial units started draining their waste water into these fertile lands, they started losing their virility and vigour. The worse was yet to come.
Lahore-based Urdu daily Khabrain reported in 1998 that a large number of children studying in Kulalanwala village in this area were developing bone deformities. Most people were initially incredulous due to the sensational way the newspaper had covered the story but everyone was shocked when similar stories appeared in other and better reputed newspapers.
Basharat Ali, a young man in his late twenties, lives in Kot Asadullah, a village adjoining Kulalanwala. He was one of the hundreds of children whose cases were reported in the 1990s. All of them had developed limp legs, rotten teeth and skewed arms. Even after growing up, their ailments did not go away. Ali lurches both forward and sideways as he walks. “Whether old or young, we all have pain in our joints,” he says. “We experience difficulties in getting up and sitting down. A lot of people have problems with their teeth,” he adds.
Immediately after the discovery of widespread bone and joint diseases in the area, many government teams, non-government agencies and journalists descended on Kulalanwala and Kot Asadullah. Some started taking soil and water samples for testing, others began collecting personal narratives of misery and suffering, and a third group set up camps to provide whatever medical services they could offer through their makeshift facilities. The Punjab government – headed by incumbent chief minister Shehbaz Sharif back then too – transported scores of children to various government hospitals in Lahore for corrective surgeries and other treatments. Ali considers himself lucky for being one of those children.
Water and soil tests later revealed that levels of arsenic, fluoride and various other metals and minerals, which are injurious to human health, were much higher than is medically permissible in the drinking water available to residents of Kulalanwala, Kot Asadullah and other villages in the area. The revelation prompted the provincial administration to promise that water filtration plants will be set up in the two villages without any delay.
Instead, the issue soon shifted to the inside pages of newspapers. The provincial government’s attention was also diverted towards the myriad other problems it was facing, including threats to its own existence, which came to an end in October 1999 when Pervez Musharraf’s military regime took over. Approximately 20 years have passed since the problem of poisonous water first surfaced in the twin villages and they still do not have a functional water filtration plant. “The situation has not really improved,” says Ali.
Weak, hobbling figures emerge from a thick blanket of smog – a toxic mixture of early winter fog, industrial and agricultural smoke and general environmental pollution – in Kulalanwala. They limp to their destinations on a recent November morning. Most of them work in nearby factories. Others have office jobs or small shops and businesses to run. Agriculture has all but died in and around the village. Some local residents have sold their farms to the water and golf resort, others have given it to factories in exchange for money even when they blame industrialisation for poisoning their water and environment.
“People have to live with their pain,” says Ali. This, in spite of the fact that stories of their medical problems have been resurfacing — though not as prominently as they did when their plight was first discovered by newspapers. In 2000, many cases of bone and joint deformities were found among residents of Shamke Bhattian, a village just 15 kilometres outside Lahore on the road leading to Multan. Ali’s father decided that he needed to attract the media’s attention to his village again. He contacted a local reporter who filed a small news report that appeared in an Urdu newspaper along with a picture of Ali. It is the only picture he has of himself from those days. He looks shrivelled and crumpled in it.
After the issue made headlines again, Lieutenant General (retd) Muhammad Safdar, then governor of Punjab, visited the area and promised setting up a water filtration plant in Kot Asadullah. The plant was set up in less than a year but it stopped working soon afterwards. Its sad remains now lie all shattered. Another plant was built in Kulalanwala months before the 2013 general elections. It was inaugurated by Rana Muhammad Iqbal, speaker of the Punjab Assembly. It remained functional for a brief period before starting to fall apart due to oversight and lack of maintenance. It now stands abandoned and deserted in the middle of the village.
Earlier this year, Nasir Iqbal, a senior officer of the Punjab Housing, Urban Development and Public Health Engineering Department in Kasur district – to which Kulalanwala and Kot Asadullah belong – visited the two villages and told locals that the provincial government’s Khadim-e-Punjab Saaf Pani (clean water) Programme would soon set up a water filtration plant for them, using the most advanced technology. He promised to a local politician that the plant will be capable of separating all the dangerous minerals, metals, bacteria and pathogens from the water that would be pumped from the ground and supplied to people at a central location. That promise is yet to materialise. “If you look around, nothing has really improved after 2000,” says Ali. If anything, the problem of industrial effluents and residential sewage stagnating around the villages has become more pronounced than ever before.
Some change has lately arrived though – and from an entirely unexpected source. A charity, Human Necessity Foundation, opened a solar-powered, state-of-the-art water filtration plant in Kulalanwala, to honour the deceased singer-turned-preacher Junaid Jamshed, in February 2017. Yet, many local residents have not given up their earlier routine. They still place large plastic jerrycans on the street in front of their doors, waiting for the delivery of drinkable water to arrive on motorcycle rickshaws from the nearby town of Manga Mandi. Sometimes their water supply arrives from as far as Lahore.
Before Shehbaz Sharif resumed his job as Punjab’s chief minister in 2008, the province was receiving funds under a drinking water supply project financed by the federal government through money provided by the World Bank. Its executing agency was the Punjab Housing, Urban Development and Public Health Engineering Department. For the next five years, a large number of filtration plants were set up across the province by the department – covering 10 to 12% of Punjab’s population. Most, if not all, of these plants started becoming dysfunctional due to lack of an efficient mechanism to maintain them regularly and keep them operational in a cost-effective way. Many of them went out of service because the government could not pay for the import of replacement filter membranes as regularly as the plants needed. In other cases, the electricity bill to keep them running ran too high to be affordable by a provincial administration that badly needed money for other projects such as a metro bus service for Lahore. Bad engineering, faulty construction and low-quality construction material also contributed to reducing their lifespan. |
