LAHORE: The Punjab government has decided to widen the rollout of new water filtration plants across the province on the directions of the Chief Minister, with 1,886 new plants to be made operational over the next two months.
Of these, 1,082 new water filtration plants will be brought fully into service in Rawalpindi Division and 800 in South Punjab.
According to a briefing by the Saaf Pani Authority, the facades of 650 older filtration plants in Lahore have been improved. A further 2,000 new filtration plants will be added in other districts of the province next year.
The performance review meeting of the Saaf Pani Authority was chaired by Minister for Housing and Urban Development Bilal Yasin. The meeting was told that work is also under way on alternative measures to ensure the availability of clean water in northern Punjab.
According to the briefing, 2,500 bottles of clean water are being provided to residents daily in four districts of South Punjab.
Mr Yasin said the completion of new filtration plants in Rawalpindi Division would help address water scarcity, and that the restoration and refurbishment of older plants would allow better facilities to be provided to citizens.
Directing that the monitoring and maintenance system for filtration plants be made more effective, he said negligence or dereliction in the provision of clean water to the public would not be tolerated.
He instructed that clean water projects be completed on time and that there be no compromise on quality. The performance of filtration plants, the quality of water and public facilities, he said, must be monitored regularly.
Providing clean and healthy drinking water to citizens, the provincial minister said, was a fundamental responsibility of the government.
Punjab’s drinking water challenge has two distinct dimensions, and filtration plants address only one of them.
The first is chemical and biological contamination of groundwater. Arsenic contamination in parts of the Indus basin, elevated total dissolved solids in southern districts, and bacteriological contamination from sewage ingress into supply lines are all documented public-health problems. Waterborne disease remains among the leading causes of childhood morbidity in the province.
The second is depletion. Lahore’s water table has fallen steadily for decades under the combined pressure of unregulated private tubewells, industrial abstraction and negligible recharge across an increasingly paved city. Filtration plants treat what is drawn; they do not address how much is drawn.
The history of Punjab’s filtration programme is, in large measure, a history of maintenance. Successive administrations have installed plants at scale; the recurring finding of audit reports and civil-society surveys has been that a significant proportion later fall out of service through membrane exhaustion, power supply failures or the absence of a funded maintenance contract.
That is why the minister’s emphasis on monitoring, rather than on installation counts, is the operative part of this announcement. A plant that is installed and photographed is a capital expenditure; a plant that is still delivering potable water three years later is a public service.
Residents queueing at community filtration points in Lahore and Rawalpindi consistently raise the same practical concerns: intermittent operation, long queues at peak hours, absence of visible water-quality test results at the point of collection, and uncertainty about how recently filters were changed. Displaying the date of the last laboratory test at each plant — a low-cost measure — is the single most frequently requested reform.
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