The Capital Development Authority’s (CDA) plan to install 65,000 light-emitting diodes (LED) at an estimated cost of Rs6.8 billion was challenged in the Islamabad High Court (IHC) on Tuesday.

Advocates Mohammad Naseem Khan and Syed Shajjar Abbas in their petition contended before the court that the multi-billion project had been awarded to a favourite firm by the prime minister and his task force constituted to oversee the CDA’s affairs.

The Federal capital is facing an acute shortage of some 98 million gallons of water per day. Its daily requirement is 180 million gallons. Some of the city’s sectors have lost complete access to drinking water – clean or otherwise!

The Capital Development Authority (CDA) is faced with the catch-22 situation after the National Accountability Bureau has raised 22 objections on the transparency of the Rs.6.5 billion LED streetlights project. “We raised 22 objections on the tendering process as well as CDA’s objectives behind launching this multibillion rupees project,” said NAB Spokesman Zafar Iqbal.

As the Supreme Court continues to grill the civic agencies, the increasing ‘contamination load’ at Rawal Lake has pushed up the purification cost of drinking water to Rs70 million per year.

Water and Sanitation Agency (Wasa) would usually allocate Rs50 million for treating water at Rawal Lake before supplying it to consumers but the cost has soared to Rs70 million — Rs10 million annually — since the apex court took suo motu notice of contamination in the lake in 2010.

The Asian Development Bank has started work on the feasibility study of the Rapid Bus Transit for Islamabad to examine whether the project would be feasible technically or financially.

"A four-member team of the ADB has reached Islamabad and launched work on the feasibility study," said a senior official of the Capital Development Authority (CDA).

He said the feasibility study would be completed by September this year, which would follow the launch of the bus service.

There was a time when the national park rangers did not need visuals to monitor the deer population in the Margalla Hills – a significant number of footprints around water bodies indicated that their population was steady if not growing rapidly. But this was four to five years back.

The city managers have signed a memorandum of understanding with a Chinese company in a bid to execute the much-awaited Rs47 billion Ghazi Barotha water supply project (GBWSP) to meet the water needs of Rawalpindi and Islamabad.

“The MoU was signed by Capital Development Authority (CDA) Chairman Farkhand Iqbal and representatives of the Chinese company – CMEC – during the former’s recent visit to Beijing,” said the CDA spokesman, Ramzan Sajid.

ISLAMABAD, Apr 17 (Agencies): Toxic gases Tuesday hampered the search for 138 people buried by an avalanche at a high-altitude Pakistan army camp, as teams from the United States and Norway arrived at the site to help operations. A huge wall of snow crashed into the remote Siachen Glacier base high in the mountains in disputed Kashmir more than a week ago, smothering an area of one square kilometre (a third of a square mile).

The Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR), in its quarterly report, has revealed that arsenic was present in seven brands of bottled water, which could cause cancer (of lungs, bladder, skin, prostrate, kidney, nose and liver), diabetes, kidney diseases, hypertension, heart diseases, birth defects and black-foot disease.

Besides this, sodium was present in five brands of bottled water, potassium in one and bacteriological contamination in three brands of bottled water.

IUCN Pakistan programme in collaboration with UNDP Environment Facility, National Energy Conservation Centre (ENERCON) Ministry of Water and Power, Government of Sindh’sTransport Department, Government of Punjab’s Urban Unit, Planning & Development Division launched the Pakistan Sustainable Transport Programme (PAKSTRAN) with a two-day workshop in Islamabad. PAKSTRAN is a five year project and would be implemented in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad/Rawalpindi from 2011 to 2016.