Pakistan International Peace & Human Rights Organization
Nindo Shaher District Badin Sindh Pakistan

Industrial pollution poses a major problem in Pakistan, where little effort was made until comparatively recently either to use clean production technologies or to adopt end-of-pipe methods of pollution control. The pollution problems affect both large enterprises in such industries as chemicals, petroleum refining and iron and steel, as well as the many clusters of small and medium sized enterprises in such industries as leather, textiles, food processing and marble polishing. The extent of this pollution is very visible in most of Pakistan�s industrial areas and is causing increasingly serious damage to the environment - in the textile-producing city of Faisalabad, for example, the groundwater has been so seriously polluted that it is no longer potable.

The past decade has witnessed an increasing awareness of the risks posed by industrial pollution, however, and resulted in a determined effort to address this problem. A major impetus for the formulation of a comprehensive environmental policy framework was given by the adoption of the Agenda 21 Programme of Action at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. In the run-up to this �Earth Summit�, the government of Pakistan approved a National Conservation Strategy (NCS) on March 1, 1992. This seeks to encourage Pakistan�s economic and industrial development without compromising its environment, biodiversity and human and natural resources, and forms the basis of all subsequently devised strategies, policies and programmes for the country�s ecologically sustainable development.

Within the context of the NCS, a comprehensive system of environment-related policy-making bodies was established in the mid-1990s. At its apex stands the Pakistan Environmental Protection Council (PEPC), which was set up to guide and supervise the formulation and implementation of appropriate strategies to combat environmental hazards. This is supported by two substantive bodies; the Technical Expert Advisory Group on National Environmental Quality Standards (NEQS), which is responsible for establishing such standards, and the Environmental Standards Committee (ESC), which was given the mandate to look into the modalities of implementing the NEQS. Other statutory bodies established in recent years to support the formulation and implementation of an effective pollution-control regime include the Marine Pollution Control Board and the Pollution Charges Committee. These bodies serve in an advisory capacity to the Ministry of Works, Environment and Urban Affairs, which bears the primary responsibility for implementing environmental protection and pollution prevention policies.

By the second half of the 1990s these bodies had begun to introduce a number of both general and industry-specific measures to reduce discharges and emissions of new pollutants and, to the extent possible, clean up the existing pollution. The most important of these measures was the establishment of a comprehensive set of NEQS, which all Pakistani industries have been required to adopt since July 1996, with severe penalties being imposed for non-compliance. This was followed by the promulgation of a new Environmental Protection Ordinance in March 1997 to replace an earlier and less stringent Environmental Protection Ordinance of 1983, which established provincial environmental protection agencies (EPAs) focussing mostly on the problem of urban pollution. In formulating and implementing its policies for environmental conservation, the government has placed special emphasis on the 21 industrial sub-sectors identified by the NCS as �polluting industries�, of which six have been marked as particularly dangerous - leather, paper, textiles, cement, sugar, chemicals and fertilizer. In each of these industries national efforts are already in place to introduce pollution abatement measures.

The private sector has played an important role in raising awareness of the environmental challenges posed by industry in Pakistan and in identifying ways of overcoming these challenges. An especially important contribution has been made in this regard by the Federation of Pakistan Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FPCCI), which is an active member of the PEPC. In a particularly important initiative, the FPCCI launched the Environmental Technology Program for Industry (ETPI) in conjunction with the Government of the Netherlands in mid-1996. This programme is intended to help Pakistani industries identify and implement the most economical pollution prevention and abatement technologies through the use of demonstration projects. As a first step in this direction, the ETPI has prepared a number of sector surveys assessing the environmental impact of specific industries, and it also publishes a regular monthly journal devoted to the subject of cleaner production and pollution control.1