While deliberating upon overall drinking water scenario in Pakistan, CRCP Secretary General Mr. Abrar Hafeez said that issues of water, particularly those relating to drinking water, have assumed critical importance over the last few years in Pakistan. He said it is the responsibility of the state to ensure that citizens have access to safe drinking water. However, he regretted, that more than half of the population of Pakistan did not have access to clean drinking water. To top it all, there does not exist Safe Drinking Water Act in Pakistan. He also lamented that even many of the bottled water brands were not fit for human consumption, according to test reports of various public sector institutions such as National Institute of Health (NIH) and Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR). Mr. Hafeez highlighted that CRCP had been running a Campaign for Safe Drinking Water since 1999 to create awareness a large scale about water issues and to lobby with the government to improve the access to citizens to safe water.

While highlighting the linkage between poverty and drinking water, Mr. Hafeez said that unavailability of clean drinking water did not only result in deterioration of general physical condition of a human being but also had the potential to cause various kinds of illnesses and epidemics. The high cost of treatment of such illnesses is beyond affordability of the poor resulting in lingering on of the illness. Quoting a survey conducted by the Pakistan National Human Development Report 2003 and Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), about 90 working days per year are lost due to illness in the poor households. He said that the issue of drinking water needed to be linked more strongly with broader discourse of poverty eradication.

Mr. Abar Hafeez further said that the issue of access to clean water was related to broader discourse of consumer protection, which has hitherto remained a neglected area. In the absence of a consumer protection law, the consumers did not have an adequate forum where they could register their complaints and seek redressal for grievance, for instance, in case of provision of contaminated water by the civic agencies and bottled water industry. He lamented that with the lobbying efforts of CRCP and other civil society groups and stakeholders, the state of consumer protection legislation was well at the advance stage in Sindh, Balochistan and Punjab. There exist Islamabad Consumer Protection Act 1995 and NWFP Consumer Protection Act 1997 for the Islamabad capital territory and NWFP province, but their rules of business still remain to be notified. Mr. Hafeez demanded of the government authorities to give top priority to the issue of safe drinking water.