Karachi’s taps have been dry for most of a generation, and Sindh’s latest remedy is an order to find the leaks. This week the chief minister told officials to treat the water crisis as a leakage problem with a fixable price tag, and to fast-track the K.B. Feeder lining and K-IV. The instruction would be welcome if it were new. Instead, it comes from a party that has run the province since 2008 and has had every chance to act.
The K-IV scheme was conceived in 2002 because planners had already concluded that supply could not keep pace with the city. Phase I was supposed to be finished between 2011 and 2015. It was approved in 2007 at Rs15.8 billion, revised to Rs25.5 billion in 2014, and is now costed at Rs172 billion with completion expected in June 2027. The increase against the original estimate is nearly 1,000 percent. For that money, the planned capacity has been cut from 650 MGD to 260 MGD. Karachi is being asked to pay roughly seven times the original price for 40 percent of the promised water.
Sindh cannot hide behind Islamabad here. The province itself began the main K-IV project in 2016 through the Karachi Water and Sewerage Corporation. The work was due to be completed in 2018. A federal government source later blamed officials’ incompetence, rampant corruption and flawed design by the Sindh government for the cost rising from Rs25 billion to Rs150 billion and bringing the project to a halt. Those are the federal side’s allegations, but they describe a province that was given the job first and could not deliver it. Only after that failure did the federal government take the project over in 2021.
Even now, the parts of K-IV that belong to Sindh are the ones lagging. The Express Tribune reported that a Rs16-billion power supply component, a 132kV line to the pumping complex from the Sindh Transmission and Dispatch Company, had not started because funds were withheld. Without electricity, the pumps do not run. In August, the federal planning minister directed Sindh to submit a comprehensive plan for the 50 megawatt power supply and the distribution network needed to operate the system. A province that must be reminded to power its own city’s water supply cannot claim to be driving the project. An earlier report noted that Sindh’s work on the water supply network had barely started and that the province had set aside only Rs100 million for the project at one point.
Then there is the water Sindh already controls. Karachi’s shortfall is variously estimated at 550 MGD or as demand of around 1.2 billion gallons a day against about 650 million supplied. Whichever figure is used, a large share of what reaches the network never arrives. Dawn’s investigation reported that about a third of pumped water is non-revenue water, and a government commission found 30 percent operational losses from a poor network, pilferage and illegal hydrants. Another analysis puts the loss at 35 percent, or 227 MGD. That volume is close to what K-IV Phase I will add. Recovering it requires no federal funding and no new canal, only a functioning utility. Sindh has controlled that utility throughout.
The tanker business shows what the province has chosen instead. Dawn found that the water board had no control over hydrants and earned virtually no revenue from them, and described a racket involving political figures, government functionaries, KWSB personnel, hydrant contractors, tanker owners, police and local strongmen. Families in places such as Orangi Town report paying Rs3,000 to Rs4,000 per tanker delivery, nearly three days of a breadwinner’s wages. The utility has even launched its own online tanker service with a website and mobile app. A water agency that sells shortage through an app has accepted failure as its business model.
The record also undermines the case for the new announcements. Fast-tracking the feeder lining is welcome. But the same government has repeatedly promised timelines for K-IV and its associated works, and each has lapsed. Directives without deadlines, named officials and published audits are not reform. They are press releases with a minister’s signature.
Karachi does not need another review meeting. It needs an annual public audit of water lost between source and tap, a binding schedule for the power line and distribution network, a funded plan for the gap that parliamentarians have flagged, and genuine enforcement against illegal hydrants. Until Sindh delivers these, its claim to be solving the crisis will remain what it has been for twenty years: a promise made to people who pay their bills and still wait for the tanker.
