By: Dr. Zeeshan Qasim
Who remembers every promise made about the Indus, if not the Indus itself? Stand on its bank at Dera Ismail Khan any evening and the water slides past at its usual unhurried pace, carrying silt from the mountains, sewage from the city and, one suspects, a good deal of paper that never became anything. It has watched drains empty into it for decades. It has heard plans announced, approved, costed and announced again. It cannot tell us what it makes of all this, so we must turn to the people who went and measured it.
A team of researchers in year 2018 published a study in the journal Environmental Monitoring and Assessment after sampling seven zones along the Indus in both the dry and the wet seasons. Pollution varied from place to place and was worse when the rains came. Several of the parameters they measured crossed the limits laid down by the World Health Organization, which the researchers used as their yardstick. Their statistical analysis then did something rare in such papers. It pointed at an address. The discharge points at Shami Road, they concluded, was a major source of the pollution. A named drain and a published finding, and that was eight years ago.
Three years after the study came the remedy, on paper at least. On May 02, 2021 Dawn reported that the Public Health Engineering Department intended to build a sewage treatment plant near Malana, with the sewage of six major drains diverted to it by pipeline. The estimated cost was Rs. 2.92 billion, of which Rs. 2.30 billion was for sewers, drains and six treatment ponds and Rs62 million for 3,000 Kanals of land. A reader might fairly have assumed the ponds were filling by now. In November 2025 Dawn reported again, this time on Rs. 4.75 billion worth of drainage and sewerage schemes at various stages in the city, and on plans for a modern treatment plant near Malana under the second phase of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Cities Improvement Project. Whether that newer figure is an updated cost for the same plant or a citywide total that merely includes it, the report does not say, and the department owes the public that distinction. The same report said wastewater was still being discharged untreated into the Indus. No published account I know of confirms that the plant is working.
The distinction matters, and it is easily lost among the announcements. Drains carry dirty water away from streets and houses. Treatment makes it fit to go anywhere. A city can build the first without the second, and all it achieves then is a change of address for the problem, from the lane outside your door to the river and to everyone who lives below it.
For many families that downstream includes the dinner table. A paper in the International Journal of Environmental Science and Technology, also from 2018, studied vegetables grown on the edge of Dera Ismail Khan and compared crops watered with untreated sewage against crops watered with fresh water. Heavy metal concentrations were significantly higher in the sewage fed vegetables. The researchers’ health risk calculations came out above one, the point at which concern begins, for lead and cadmium across the vegetables they studied and for nickel in three of them. These are modelled estimates of risk and not a count of the sick, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. Still, a farmer cannot see a heavy metal, and a shopper at a roadside cart cannot tell from a bunch of greens which water raised it. It is fair to ask whether the vegetables sold in our markets are routinely tested, and whether anyone ever publishes the results.
The sugar mills come into this as well, but they need separate handling, because their wastewater is a different animal from municipal sewage. It is heavy with organic matter and dissolved salts, and when it reaches a river the bacteria that break it down use up the oxygen that fish need. A 2011 study of groundwater at 15 locations around a sugar mill in the district found high conductivity, dissolved salts, hardness, bicarbonate, sulphate and sodium close to the mill. That does not prove the mill caused every reading. It does mean somebody owes the district a fresh round of testing. The older and sadder entry in the record dates from 2 May 2014, when Dawn reported that 13 people drowned in a drain carrying effluent from Chashma Sugar Mills in the Ramak area, while eight others were reported unconscious. The then chief minister ordered an inquiry. Readers may wish to ask what it concluded, since thirteen names deserve more than a single drowned headline.
Dera Ismail Khan is hardly alone in this, though its drains make the stakes plainer than most. When the UN World Water Development Report 2026 was presented in Pakistan, the World Health Organization’s regional office reported, citing WHO and UNICEF estimates, that around 55 % of the population lacks safely managed drinking water and that more than 58 % of people in rural areas lack safely managed sanitation. In the language of the WHO and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Program, safely managed water is available at home, when needed, and free from faecal and priority chemical contamination. A river that receives untreated sewage while people downstream depend on it for their crops is unlikely to help that arithmetic.
Then there is the river’s other resident, one that cannot file a complaint. Between the Chashma and Sukkur barrages lives the Bhulan, the blind Indus dolphin, which finds its way by sound. A study published in 2025 in Endangered Species Research put the population at an estimated 1,987, a recovery that conservationists, WWF Pakistan among them, credit to patient work with riverside communities. Good news, though a modest amount of it. The species remains listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and its range has shrunk by roughly 80%. WWF counts water pollution among the pressures on it, alongside barrages and fishing nets, and describes the animal as an indicator of the river’s health. If the dolphin is the river’s thermometer, we should not be content to leave it unread.
What ought to happen is not complicated. The Malana plant, if it is to be more than a line in a development program, needs a published timetable, a current approved cost, a stated treatment capacity and a straight answer on whether all six of the original drains will feed it. The 2021 estimate is now five years old, and nobody should assume the final bill will match it. The river and the main irrigation drain need regular testing, with results put where a farmer or a school teacher can read them. Residents who live beside open drains hardly need a laboratory to tell them something is wrong, but a laboratory is what donors, courts and departments will ask for, which is why the testing matters. Vegetables sold in the city should be sampled and the findings made public. The sugar mills should be inspected against the national environmental standards that already bind them, and what inspectors find should be told to the people who live near the discharge. No new science is required, since the research already exists. What is missing is an official willing to put his name beside the results.
The Indus will be there at the next monsoon, as it was at the last, rising and falling and carrying away whatever the city gives it. It keeps the minutes of every meeting held about it, and at present they read like a long list of announcements with very few results to show for them. The families of Dera Ismail Khan have lived beside it longer than any department has existed, and they are entitled to a better record. When will the river be shown something other than another plan?
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