LAHORE: The Punjab government has decided to commission a survey of 737 water filtration plants across the province to assess the quality of the water they are supplying.

The decision was reported on Wednesday by both Lahore News HD and City42, and follows a broader push by the provincial administration on clean-water infrastructure. Earlier this month, the government also decided to map all clean-water projects in Punjab onto its centralised One Map platform, part of an effort to bring scattered scheme data into a single system.

The survey lands in the middle of an unusually busy few weeks for the province’s water portfolio. On Monday, Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif approved a pilot project to supply clean drinking water to households through pipelines in six districts — Rajanpur, Lahore, Faisalabad, Chakwal, Rawalpindi and the Murree-Kotli Sattian area — chosen to represent south, central and north Punjab. She directed officials to consult the respective deputy commissioners, WASA officials and Public Health Engineering Department experts before finalising the implementation plan. Days earlier, at a separate review, she ordered the completion of all 1,886 water filtration plant projects across the province at the earliest, and the meeting reviewed proposals for 670 clean drinking water bottling plants.

Quality testing has been a recurring gap in the programme. At the end of July, the chief minister sought a foolproof province-wide safe drinking water plan within five days and ordered the Punjab Saaf Pani Authority restructured and upgraded on the model of the Suthra Punjab programme, with modern technology, human resources and transport. That meeting directed that all 5,734 water filtration plants be repaired and properly maintained, with additional plants installed where required, and that plant IDs, operators’ names, contact numbers and operating hours be displayed at filtration and RO plants across the province. It also agreed to hire an international consultancy and introduce Japanese and Chinese purification technology.

The monitoring architecture the survey would feed into has been taking shape since early June, when a review meeting of the Punjab Saaf Pani Authority chaired by Housing Minister Bilal Yasin was told a dedicated squad of 100 motorbikes would be deployed to inspect filtration plants and check plant functionality and water quality. Officials said the mobile teams would help identify faults quickly and cut downtime, particularly where plants have had repeated operational problems. The meeting was also told the 1336 helpline would be strengthened, monitoring enhanced through geotagging and photographic verification, and laboratory testing systems for water quality upgraded. Separately, all plants under the Chief Minister Clean Water Program — for which Rs8 billion was allocated in the current fiscal year — are to undergo digital geo-tagging for continuous performance evaluation.

Field reporting suggests why testing matters. In Multan, 295 of roughly 450 filtration plants were reported out of service at the end of July, idled by unchanged filters and faulty machinery, with the relevant authority saying it needs hundreds of millions of rupees to revive them and declining to commit to a deadline. Funding for exactly this problem was approved in May, when annual grants were cleared for 5,182 filtration plants, with the Punjab Social Protection Authority to receive yearly funding for their restoration, monitoring and upkeep.

The underlying water quality picture is poor. The draft National Water Quality Monitoring Report (2015–2016) by the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources found only about 35% of water sources in Punjab suitable for drinking. A more recent precedent for what a sampling exercise can turn up: of 364 samples the LG&CD Department drew from drinking-water sources in Lahore, Kasur, Okara and Bahawalpur in early 2015, 329 came back contaminated with arsenic and bacteria.