Afghanistan lies in arid or semi-arid climatic region of the South Asia suffering from physical water scarcity with larger gaps between water availability and demand in different consuming sectors. In the last couple of years, the water scarcity has increased tremendously and is getting worse with the passage of every day. Population growth, which became triple in the last three decades, economic development, rapid urbanization, industrialization and other triggers for the declining of safe drinking water.

To the surprise of the experts of this sector, this sector largely remains unnoticed on policy level and thus don’t get any attention on bureaucratic as well policy levels.

Weak status of law enforcement in drinking water regulation and mitigation of the vulnerable effects of climate change has pushed the country into crises compared to other regional countries. The effects of these crises are quite visible at the capital city of the country where the groundwater table successively drops down due to the over exploitation of the groundwater aquifers against a limited recharge in return. The country’s water resources are heavily dependent on rain and snowfall, whilst groundwater withdrawal is the primary source of drinking water supply (i.e. 48%).

Safe drinking water in major cities of Afghanistan including Kabul in the country.

The government and other relevant quarters are slow in raising awareness on the topic in the country. As a result, citizens are not playing their role in safeguarding their water from one side and the government has paid a deaf ear to the problem on the other side. Consequentially, the situation begs attention on two fronts; the government needs to pay attention to the grave problem and fight the menace from one side and the people have to behave responsibly in dealing with drinking water from the other side.

In case of Kabul, there are four major wastewater treatment plants; in Wazir Akbar Khan, Qala e Zaman Khan, Thai Maskan and Karte-4. The wastewater treatment plants are of extremely poor quality and don’t have the potential to treat the water. Despite this, their poor efficiency can barely cover half of the population of Kabul city. The underground as well as surface water are contaminated and took many forms of biological and chemical pollutants due to wastewater that are being drained to streets and canals which either infiltrates, percolates and reach the groundwater table or eventually ends up in the Kabul River. Since Kabul River is flowing in the heart of the city, more frequently used as a solid waste dump side and receives illegal discharge of sewage from the residential and commercial areas thereby working as a hub for dangerous pathogens and germ colonies which causes various diseases especially among the communities living and working alongside this river.

In order to cope with the high infection rate and water related health has caused unequal distribution of water resources as well as marginalization of communities. As If the  government doesn’t take steps to solve this issue and  tackle the situation, the projected climate change scenarios will further exacerbate that will trigger migration in the next couple of decades for  getting safe drinking water.

An administrative arrangement for managing water shortage is also a key hurdle in continued economic development of Afghanistan. In terms of remedial arrangement, the government of Afghanistan has to some extent managed the water shortage problem, rather than solving it. If the government fails to enforce applicable and sustainable solutions about drinking water scarcity and depletion issues, it stands to reason that the country will face severe drought in the future. Then Afghanistan will be forced to import water from abroad like other goods. Therefore, on priority basis an understanding of the administrative arrangements; for the better performance, tariff control, consumer well-being, public health, and environmental protection are recommended. This might propose a regulatory design required for the sector reforms in order to minimize the present and predicted environmental health risks from both natural and anthropogenic sources of water contamination and management. This way an initiative will lead us to ensure sustainable management of potable water for the most needy communities and regions of the country.

View expressed in this article are of the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Pajhwok’s editorial policy.

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