QUETTA: The provincial administration of Balochistan has said it would supply water in Pir Koh, a settlement in the remote region of Dera Bugti in Pakistan’s southwest, where the use of contaminated drinking water due to water shortages has caused an outbreak of cholera, killing at least four people in the last 24 hours.
Officials said the residents of the area, which has a population of about 40,000, were forced in recent weeks to drink from ponds full of contaminated water in the absence of clean drinking water.
On Thursday, District Health Officer Dr Azam Bugti said four people had died due to cholera in Pir Koh Dera Bugti and 123 new cases were reported in the town in the last 24 hours, bringing the total number of cases since the last week of April to 1,623.
“Chief Minister Balochistan Mir Abdul Quddus Bizenjo has taken notice of water scarcity in Pir Koh area of Dera Bugti,” said an official statement circulated by his office said on Wednesday. “A special fund of Rs10 million has been released to the PHE [Public Health Engineering] department to supply water [to the area] on an emergency basis.”
The statement said the provincial administration had also decided to send medical teams to Pir Koh and instructed relevant authorities to ensure continuous water supply to the area with the help of tankers until the beginning of the monsoon season.
“The basic health unit [in Pir Koh] has been treating nearly 1,500 patients, most of them women and children, with clear symptoms of diarrhea since the last week of April after the town was hit by a cholera outbreak,” Dr Bugti had told Arab News on Wednesday.
“We collected water samples from ponds being used for drinking purposes which have tested positive for the bacteria causing cholera,” he added.
Pictures and video clips on social media showed the residents of Pir Koh fetching contaminated water from a pool to meet their requirements, as hundreds of others queued up to get clean drinking water from bousers sent by the provincial administration.
“The water needs of people in the area increased as temperature started rising in the first week of May,” said the deputy commissioner of Dera Bugti, Mumtaz Kethran. “Unfortunately, water level in most of the towns in Dera Bugti has dropped to about a thousand feet. Hence, the population is now dependent on rains.”
Dera Bugti, a town rich with natural gas, has been fulfilling the country’s fuel requirements since 1951, though poverty and lawlessness have deprived its own people of basic needs during all these decades.
Pakistan’s state-owned Oil and Gas Development Company Limited (OGDCL) has been regularly providing four water bousers in Pir Koh, but these are no longer sufficient for the growing population of the area.
“We have been getting these water bousers for the population of 40,000 people,” Shahid Husain Bugti, a resident of Pir Koh, said. “However, they are not enough to meet the needs of Pir Koh.”
