KARIM ULLAH
Upper Chitral’s district headquarters, Booni, is famous for its beauty and generosity. The hospitality of its people is also well known. There was a time when two to four students would live in every house in Boni, and the locals – the “Bloneghan” – never showed even a hint of displeasure on their faces. Even today, the hospitality of Booni’s people is exemplary.
Booni is the district headquarters of Upper Chitral. Before that, it was the subdivisional headquarters of Mastuj, meaning that for the past 40–50 years, Upper Chitral’s administrative, political and institutional affairs have been centered in Booni.
Three times, members of the provincial assembly have been elected from here: MPA Ghulam Muhammad, MPA Sardar Hussain, and now Deputy Speaker Suriya Bibi, who is from the nearby village of Awi.
Despite all this, Booni remains deprived of basic human needs. Like other parts of Upper Chitral, its electricity supply is unreliable. Whether it is winter or summer, people here continue to long for clean drinking water, a problem persisting not just for years but for decades.
A few years ago, clean water supply was made possible through WASEP but the severe climatic conditions and growing population have rendered that pipeline insufficient. The pipeline itself was built through community self-help. Yet the shameful aspect is that even these few drops of water are being taken away from the public by the Upper Chitral district administration, the Public Health Department, and the judiciary.
The Public Health Department’s pipeline exists, but it delivers no water in winter or summer.
And whenever water does come through that pipeline, it is not fit for drinking.
For more than two weeks now, there has not been even a single drop of drinking water in Booni. Yet from the administration to the elected representatives and political parties, everyone is in a deep slumber.