Let’s take a trip inside Lahore’s primary railway station, the Lahore Junction Railway Station, where you’ll find several families restlessly wait for the train to arrive. The Lahori heat has enervated them of every single ounce of energy.

Unfortunately, most of them do not have enough resources to buy even a mineral water bottle. Patience is all they have.

Just a few miles from the Railway station, a little deeper into old Lahore, there’s a 14-year-old boy with his tattered box containing a shoe-cleaning kit. He hardly gets any customers in this area. Even though he can see a small khokha in the distance, its front adorned with chilled mineral water bottles, he cannot seem to have the courage to get up and get a water bottle for himself. It will take two days of his earnings to buy one. So, he just decides to stay there and continues arranging his kit, hoping for some customers.

80 percent of the Pakistanis all over the country, unfortunately,  go through similar predicament every day of their lives.

The worst part is when 80 percent of the population that has no resources whatsoever to buy safe water for their families, they end up consuming the contaminated water. And as a result, a good amount of them suffering from diseases like cholera, dysentery, hepatitis and birth defects. Add on top of that the lack of hospitals and things get even worse. Just this month, Minister for Science and Technology, Rana Tanveer, revealed in Senate that 69 to 80 percent of the samples that were collected by the Pakistan Council for Research in Water Resources (PCRWR) from 2,807 Pakistani villages, turned out to be contaminated. The water had several types of bacteria, totally dissoluble solids, toxic metals and other lethal substances. The story just does not end here.

This is where PEL comes in with their public water coolers. 

As part of their most recent campaign, PEL Say Zindagi, PEL wanted to raise awareness around clean drinking water. And so, they went around Lahore installing water dispensers in Abid Market and Patyala ground between May and June. We’re hoping more people join in to combat the lack of access to clean drinking water in Pakistan. While the weather has started cooling down a bit now, you can only imagine the excruciating pain people must have gone through during peak summer time.

So let’s make sure we continue to raise awareness around the lack of access to clean water.

This post is sponsored by PEL.