RAWALPINDI: Water and Sanitation Agency (Wasa) has severed 25 illegal water connections in different areas of the city, besides giving a two week deadline to the people to regularise their connections, otherwise cases will be registered with the relevant police stations.

A senior Wasa official told Dawn that the agency would soon launch a campaign against the defaulting commercial water consumers aimed at bringing them into tax net.

He said the total water consumers in the city are 130,000 including 20,000 commercial ones. He said that 70pc of commercial water consumers and 30pc domestic water consumers paid no bills and some people used water illegally especially by the owners of cattle pens of milch animals, hotels, service stations and others.

`In a recent survey, Wasa detected 5,000 illegal water connections in the city and brought most of them into the tax net,` he said and added that the agency was working on a plan carry out survey on regularbasis.

He said government departments did not pay their water bills regularly.

`Rawalpindi Municipal Corporation, police stations, government run schools and colleges and hospitals are using water without paying their bills regularly,` he said.

He said that notices had also been served on them to pay their outstanding dues within a month otherwise the water connection would be snapped. `We are facing problem to collect water and sani-tation services dues from the government departments,` he said.

He said Wasa wanted to expand its network of legal consumers, therefore, it cut off water connections as a last option.

He said that the connection had been restored after receiving the dues.

When contacted, Wasa spol(esman Umer Farooq said Wasa had given incentives to bring more people into tax net especially those having illegal water connections. `The agency asked the people to pay the water connection fee and one year water charges in easy installments to regularise their water connections,` he said.

He said that the agency had prepared a comprehensive plan and devised a package to recover money from defaulters. In order to improve and simplify the recovery process,he said,the defaulters will have the facility to submit the money in easy installments, get the compound interest waved off.

He said that the defaulters were included hotels, commercial plazas, petrol and CNG stations and some domestic consumers.

He said that non-payment of water charges was causing millions of rupees loss to Wasa every year, thus hindering the launch of new projects.

He said that water charges of Wasa was less than Cantonment Board and adjoining capital city Islamabad as the domestic consumer paid Rs100 to Rs130 per month while Cantonment board charges more than Rs300 to Rs500 per month as minimum amount.A Reporter