The Punjab Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) failed in updating its own laboratories established in different districts of the province as they are unable to test water samples, Minute Mirror has learned.
Currently, EPA has laboratories in eight districts of the province including Lahore, Multan, Faisalabad, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Rahim Yar Khan, Sheikhupura, and Rawalpindi and no laboratory has the capacity to test more than eight wastewater parameters out of 58.
All these labs were established and started functioning under Section 2(e) of Pakistan Environmental Protection Act (PEPA) 1997 for environmental sampling, testing, and analysis, while the department declared these labs as certified under Section 6(k) of the same act.
EPA’s laboratory in Lahore was set up with the establishment of the agency in 1997 while in 2005, the Multan lab was established under an Annual Development Project (ADP) scheme.
The Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) had joined hands with Punjab EPA in 2005 and assisted and facilitated EPA staff by providing modern equipment and training.
Under a project in 2009, six more laboratories were established in Faisalabad, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Rahim Yar Khan, Sheikhupura, and Rawalpindi. A hefty Rs400 million was spent on the project.
The purpose of the establishment of laboratories was to enhance the capacity of monitoring and testing of air, surface water, and drinking water samples. Initially, these labs were designed to test at least 58 out of 102 parameters as scribed in the National Environmental Quality Standards (NEQS), which were later adopted as Punjab Environmental Quality Standards (PEQS). The said 58 parameters belonged to wastewater and drinking water.
Instead of enhancing the testing parameters, this capacity has been reduced only to eight parameters of PEQS. These parameters are of a very basic nature like potential of hydrogen (pH), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), chemical oxygen demand (COD), total dissolved solids (TDS), total suspended solids (TSS), chloride (Cl), sulfate (SO4) and sulfide (S2).
An officer in the laboratory section informed that due to low testing capacity it was hard to analyze the environmental situation accurately in the province. He said that under such circumstances frequent checks could not be maintained on violators on scientific grounds.
“Currently Punjab EPA has no accurate record or any data with it regarding the wastewater pollution generated by industry,” he said.
Moreover, the officer alleged that the Punjab EPA also received 104 different kinds of gadgets from JICA including atomic absorption spectrometer (AAS), gas chromatograph (GC), multi-gas analyzer (Pg-250), ion chromatograph (IC), and others which, had been left for rusting in different districts.
This scribe tried to contact Punjab EPA’s spokesperson Dr. Amir Farooq but he was not available for comment.
