LAHORE: Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif has ordered that drainage and sewerage problems in villages across the province be resolved on a priority basis, and directed that village streets be paved and beautified, according to an official statement issued after a special review meeting on the Model Village Project.
The meeting was informed that sewerage, drainage and brick-paved street projects were progressing rapidly in more than 3,500 villages across Punjab. The Chief Minister received a detailed briefing on the initiative and its ongoing schemes.
The figure places the programme among the largest rural infrastructure rollouts currently under execution in the province, and its scale is precisely what makes delivery monitoring difficult — a challenge the meeting addressed directly.
The Chief Minister approved the introduction of community-based organisations for the Model Village Project, a structural shift that moves part of the oversight burden from the district bureaucracy to residents themselves.
A principle decision was also taken to involve assistant commissioners, community health mobilisers, Union Council secretaries, headmasters and other relevant stakeholders in rural development projects. The inclusion of headmasters and health mobilisers is notable: both are permanently stationed in the villages concerned, unlike visiting engineers or contractors, giving the programme a standing local presence.
The meeting further agreed to assign members of the provincial assembly the responsibility of monitoring rural development projects in their constituencies.
“I cannot see people suffering from broken streets and stagnant, dirty water,” the Chief Minister said.
“Providing drainage, sewerage and paved streets in every village is the government’s responsibility. People living in rural areas also have an equal right to public resources,” she added.
Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif said the Model Village Project was very close to her heart and expressed her resolve to transform the condition of every village.
Stagnant wastewater in unlined village streets is not only a nuisance issue. It is a recognised vector for waterborne disease and dengue breeding, and it compounds seasonally when monsoon runoff has nowhere to drain. Punjab’s rural settlements have historically received a smaller share of municipal infrastructure spending than its cities, where development authorities operate with dedicated budgets and staff.
Brick-paved streets, or soling, remain the standard intervention because they can be executed quickly and by local labour. The harder engineering question is drainage: paving without a functioning outfall simply relocates standing water. Whether the community-based organisations approved on Tuesday are given any say over that sequencing will largely determine how durable the results are once the project’s first phase concludes.
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