Reservoirs of problems

The scramble for Karachi's scarce water resources

By Moosa Kaleem and Maqbool Ahmed

Imagine a city that requires 1,000 million gallons of water every day and then imagine a system that, even in the best case scenario, can carry only half of that water to the city. It is inevitable that dishonest officials, unscrupulous elements, profiteers and even crime rackets see this shortage as a window of opportunity to make a quick buck. Quite naturally, those vested in its failure would like to keep the system as inadequate and inefficient as it always has been. This is Karachi and a summary of its water woes for you.

Almost all of Karachis water supply comes from two main sources Keenjhar Lake, about 120 kilometres to the northeast of the city and Hub Dam, which is 60 kilometres toward the northwest. The original design capacity of both sources stood at 583 million gallons daily (MGD) and 100 MGD respectively, but these have decreased considerably due to poor upkeep of water transporting machinery, theft and, in the case of Hub Dam, paucity of rainfall.

Since February 2014, Hub Dam has been providing only 24 per cent of the water it is meant to replenish Karachi with, say sources in the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board (KWSB) which oversees the transportation and distribution of water in the metropolis. Similarly, the quantity of water coming from Keenjhar Lake, falls well short of what it should be. Meters installed at a pumping station right outside Karachi show that the city has been getting only 400 MGD to 415 MGD of water from the lake for the last six months, claims Mohsin Raza, the general secretary of the Peoples Labour Union, an association of the KWSB employees.

Hub Dam was constructed in 1982 and since then its water storage has decreased in a big way. Over the last two years, rains have been few and far between in the catchment area of the dam, spread over 3,410 square miles, and the water stored here is just five feet above what in technical terms is called dead level. If the reservoir could store water to its maximum capacity, its water level would be 63 feet above the dead level. The latter depth has not been achieved in recent years.

The major source of potable water for Karachi, therefore, remains Keenjhar Lake. Spread over 60 square kilometres, the lake has a storage capacity of 0.524 million acre-feet (MAF) of water out of which 0.393 MAF can be transported out of the lake through canals. Keenjhar is an artificial lake which was built in the 1950s after two natural lakes in Thatta district of Sindh, Sunehri Lake and Kalri Lake, were joined and then linked to the Indus river to serve as a reservoir and supply water to domestic, commercial and industrial consumers in Karachi as well as to irrigate 352,000 acres of land in Thatta. A canal originating from Kotri Barrage at the Indus, Keenjhar-Baghar (KB) Feeder (Upper), carries 9,100 cubic feet per second (cusec) of river water to the lake and another canal, KB Feeder (Lower), takes the water from the lake to the fields in Thatta district.

Through a third system of canals, water from the lake travels 120 kilometres to reach Karachi. It covers 46 kilometres of this distance in a series of open canals the first one of which is a 29-kilometre long Keenjhar-Gujjo (KG) canal which originates from a point called Chilya at the southern end of the lake.

This canal was constructed in 1978. Earlier, water to Karachi was supplied through KB Feeder (Lower) canal, says Muhammad Iqbal Paleejo, an executive engineer at KWSBs canal maintenance division.

The bed and the banks of the KG canal were reinforced with concrete in 1993 and, in 1997, the canal authorities acquired an additional 250 feet of land along each of its sides to further protect it from soil erosion and facilitate its maintenance and desilting. Travelling along the canal, however, one finds a number of fish farms on both sides, all getting water from the canal. At other places, farmers can be seen using water from the canal to irrigate their fields.

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Reservoirs of problems