By Waqar Mustafa
LAHORE, Pakistan, Oct 10 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Five mornings a week, Saima Azeem helps her children wash and prepare for school. But this week has been different: She has had to use her few bottles of drinking water to get them ready.
“It’s been a difficult morning. I’ll have to schedule my chores according to the new water supply timing,” the mother of four told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Faced with fast-depleting groundwater supplies, Lahore – Pakistan’s second biggest city – this week began rationing water and instituting a range of new conservation measures.
Lahore relies on groundwater to fill its taps but groundwater levels are now falling at a rate of about 2.5 to 3 feet (0.7 to 0.9 metres) a year, according to WWF-Pakistan.
The water table in the centre of the city is now 130 feet (40 metres) down and is expected to fall below 230 feet (70 metres) by 2025, WWF researchers noted in 2017.
“If the trend continues the situation will become even worse by 2040,” they predicted.
To try to avoid a crisis, Lahore’s Water and Sanitation Agency (WASA) on Tuesday began turning off the city’s 700,000 water connections 12 out of each 24 hours.
Users will now get water only from approximately 4 am to 9 am, noon to 2 pm and 5 pm to 10 pm, officials said.
The water agency also increased water tariffs by about 20 percent for households and about 400 percent for commercial users.
Previously, water prices had been frozen since 2004.
