KARACHI, Pakistan (Asia Water Wire) – The 18th century port-city is not only Pakistan’s largest but also boasts of a harbour which is said to be among the best in Asia. 

   The city lies northwest of the Indus delta, the country’s largest river system. Another river, Lyari flows across the city and empties into the harbour comprising of over 3 kilometres of wharfs, docks and other installations. 

   But this is the Karachi you get to read about only in tourist guidebooks. 

   Today the river Lyari has turned into what environmentalists prefer calling a “sewer” that carries everything from solid wastes to toxic industrial effluents directly into the sea.

   According to estimates, the city’s waterways dump roughly 200 million gallons per day (mdg) of untreated industrial waste, including toxic effluents, and solid waste into the Arabian Sea. The city produces about 390 mdg of wastewater every day.

   “Much more could be going into the sea and nobody seems to care — not the city government, industry or the community,” says Ahmed Saeed, an environmentalist at the World Conservation Union (IUCN), Pakistan.

   He adds that most of the sewage that reaches the three treatment plants in the city is let to pass almost untreated.

   The water in the harbour appears clean because the tides flush out the visible wastes dumped from the city. But the chemicals in the waste keep adding to the sea and their impact on the environment remains largely unknown.

   Much of the plastic in the waste is washed back to the shores and this has not only polluted the beaches but has also affected the growth mangrove forests in the Indus River delta.

   At its prime, the fan-shaped Indus delta used to spread across roughly 600,000 hectares. Today only some 160,000 hectares of the mangrove cover remains.

   Known as the ‘lungs’ of the city, the mangrove cover is the ‘nursery’ for the fish and shrimp (incidentally a major export) and habitat for rare birds and reptiles.

   Environmental stress caused by reduced fresh water flows, raw sewage and industrial pollution, is visible in the stunted vegetation growth, which scientists say, is caused by increased growth of algae that thrive in polluted waters.

   However, it is not only polluted water from the sewers that is threatening the coastal ecology. 

   Karachi handles most of Pakistan’s oil imports — also imports headed for neighbouring Afghanistan — and its waters have often been the “dumping ground” for waste from leakages from ships visiting the port. 

   The growing metropolis comprises of modern industries — almost 70 of all of Pakistan’s industries — as  well as well as thick clusters of katchi abadis or squatter settlements.

   The city has three waste water treatment plants with the capacity of cleaning up to 175 million gallons of water everyday. 

   However, according to Shahid Lutfi, deputy director, Sindh Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the treatment plants remain under-used and only about 20-35 million gallons of waste water is treated daily.

   The existing system is unable to cope with the sewage produced by city’s population of 14 million that is growing by about 0.5 per cent each year. Also roughly 28 per cent households are not connected with the sewerage system. 

   The city government is planning to set up two new treatment plants to treat water from two major natural storm water drains that now carry pitch black untreated water directly into the sea.

   Setting up new treatment facilities is expensive and is the easy part, much difficult is regular operation and maintenance, says Lutfi of the EPA. “We need to set up an independent body to manage the system rather than leaving the task to government agencies,” he adds.

   Environmentalists blame the lax enforcement by the EPA for the increasing pollution.

   Pakistan is a signatory to various international conventions — the  Marpol 73/78, London Dumping Convention, Oil Pollution Response Cooperation, United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea among others — which are related to pollution of the seas.

   But compliance remains a problem.

   The EPA is a regular government unit — not a specialised enforcement agency — and often its employees are regular bureaucrats who are appointed and transferred at will. 

   “Many small industries do not have the financial resources needed to implement environmental technologies,” says IUCN’s Saeed. The poor state of the enforcement agency explains the rest of the neglect.

   In 2003 the Greek tanker Tasman Spirit spilled its cargo of 60,000 tonnes of crude oil into the port after which the government used chemical dispersants to dissolve the oil on the surface.

   The impact of such accidents and the regular overdose of toxic sewage on the marine life – fish, algae, the endangered green turtles, the crustaceans and the mangroves – remains largely unaccounted.

   “When we carried out a marine bacterial genome sequence, we found it to be highly resistant and versatile,” says Dr Nuzhat Ahmed, at the Centre for Molecular Genetics. 

   “No where in the world you find bacteria that can tolerate such toxicity and be able to survive the level of pollution that is found in the Arabian Sea,” she adds.

   Over the years, the size of crabs, shrimps and lobsters caught in the Arabian Sea has shrunk and scientists have also reported hydrocarbon traces in fish. 

   According to a recent government survey, the catch of the two popular fish species (palla and dangri) has declined from about 600 tons in 1986 to 200 tons in 2005.

   “It is time to clean up our act,” says Saeed. 

   “While people criticise the World Trade Organisation rules there is a silver lining to it in the guise of enforcing compliance to environmental standards by major industries like the tanneries and the textiles, he adds.

   The Pakistan Tanners Association began setting up a combined effluent treatment plant for some 170 tanneries in the region about 10 years ago. The project — delayed mainly by financial problems — is expected to be complete later this year. 

   “It’s not that the industrialists don’t know the hazards, it’s just that solutions demand high investment and a lot of political will,” says Saeed. “The local consumers too are quite aware of the impacts but funding remains a problem.” (END/AWW/IPSAP/ZE/BB/05)