| ISLAMABAD - The water withdrawal from Simly Dam has been reduced from 24MGD to 22MGD to save water for upcoming summer season, when demand usually goes up due to hot weather.
Simly and Khanpur dams are two major sources of water supply in the urban areas of Islamabad as currently it receives about half of water from these two sources. The decision to curtail water supply has been taken by the Capital Development Authority as the water level in Simly Dam is continuously decreasing due to lack of rains in this winter season.
It is pertinent to mention here that the water supply from the Khanpur Dam has already been reduced 34 percent because the water level is also at a critical stage there and only 34 percent storage left in this reservoir. At present, the federal capital is receiving half of its water supply from these two dams as the city gets 22MGD from Simly Dam and 7MGD from the Khanpur Dam.
Besides these dams, 29.33MGD water are being extracted and supplied through the tube wells located in the different parts of the city while about 4MGD are being taken from Saidpur, Shahdara and Noorpur water works and the Rawal dam.
The current water needs of the city are 120MGD but at present the water supply is 62.3MGD, which means that the city is being given half of its water needs.
Though, the water scarcity issue is reached to an alarming level but the city managers are limited to building roads and bridges and there are no serious efforts to over come this issue.
The population in Islamabad has reached to 2.35 million and about 240MGD water is needed for both rural and urban part of the city. Unfortunately, the current water supply system is available only in the sectoral areas and the model villages while rural areas are deprived from this facility. The CDA Board had approved the proposal of constructing two Dams avoid scarcity of potable water in Islamabad as medium term intervention but both the dams are at feasibility level. These dams includes Shahdra Dam with a capacity of 6MGD and Chiniot Dam with a capacity 10-12 MGD, which will be built at upstream of Simly Dam.
On the other side, a long term project to resolve the water shortage issue was also conceived in which conduction of water from Indus River System at Tarbela Dam was planned for Islamabad & Rawalpindi. The previous government of Pakistan Tahreek-e-Insaf has started its feasibility study and also earmarked a token allocation for land acquisition but the project could not be materialised. Sources told that now the Government of Kuwait has agreed to finance re-feasibility of the project and if implemented the phase-I of the project will have a total capacity of 200MGD out of whi |
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