For Karachi's Water Mafia, Stolen H2O Is A 'Lucrative Business'
Shiny, decorated and colorful water tankers park near a hydrant in Karachi, Pakistan. Diaa Hadid/NPR
In Korangi, a slum neighborhood of Karachi, a sprawling port city of some 16 million people in Pakistan, there’s no running water.
So how do people get the water they need to drink, to cook, to wash up and to clean their homes?
Residents have to call men like Mohammad Zubair, a driver who belongs to a group of water handlers known as the “water tanker mafia.” For a price, drivers will deliver clean water, which is pricey, or polluted water, which is cheaper.
A young man fills the jerry cans tied to his motorbike with water in the Korangi slum. Diaa Hadid/NPR
In a grubby café in Karachi, Saghir Ahmed, a water tanker driver, explains how the mafias work. He says that he and other drivers routinely pay off officials from Karachi’s water board, the police and the “landlords” — men who own the land where the government pipes are punctured, and who build valves to allow the drivers to pump the water. Those valves, used to steal government water, are called “illegal hydrants.”
“The water board, police and landlord — these three — they benefit, they take the money,” he says.
A large water tanker in the Orangi slum in Karachi transfers part of its water to a smaller tanker. The area doesn’t have running water, and the streets are too narrow for large water tankers, so residents move the water to smaller tankers that can ply the hilly area. Diaa Hadid/NPR
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