Rawalpindi Cantt borewell fee: Rs 55,400 for a house, Rs 200,000 for a shop

The Rawalpindi Cantonment Board has issued notices charging residents for borewells they drilled on their own property: Rs 55,400 for a residential borewell and Rs 200,000 for a commercial one. The notices cite Resolution No. 23 of a board meeting and gave recipients seven days to pay.

The board's position is that pumping groundwater from under your own plot is extraction from an underground reserve, and that doing it without board permission is illegal. Householders who do not pay face removal of the borewell and legal action.

Why people drilled in the first place

Cantonment residents put in borewells because the piped supply runs roughly 15 days a month. A house with no tank storage and no bore has water half the time. That is the context the fee lands in: people are being charged for a workaround they built because the utility did not deliver.

What it costs a household

At Rs 55,400, the fee is comparable to the cost of a modest borewell installation itself. For a household on a fixed income it is a significant one-time hit, and the seven-day window leaves little room to arrange the money or to contest the notice.

For a shop or small business, Rs 200,000 is more than three times the residential charge, with no published slab for depth or extraction volume in the notice.

The running cost people forget

A borewell is not free water even before the fee. A half-horsepower pump running two hours a day uses roughly 45 to 50 units a month. At protected-slab rates that is a few hundred rupees; on higher slabs it can cross a thousand. Rawalpindi households are on IESCO, so that cost lands on your monthly bill.

Check what your pump is adding with the electricity bill calculator, and pull up your current bill with our IESCO bill check guide.

What to do if you got a notice

1. Keep the notice. Note its date, the resolution number and the seven-day deadline written on it.
2. Ask the board office for the schedule of charges the figure comes from, in writing. A fee has to trace back to a notified resolution.
3. Check whether your property is inside the cantonment limits. Cantonment board rules do not apply to adjoining municipal or TMA areas, and boundaries in Rawalpindi are not intuitive.
4. Do not pay cash to anyone who comes to the door. Payment against a board notice goes through the board's own office and produces a receipt.

The board has not published a depth-based or volume-based slab, and no separate industrial rate appears in the notices issued so far.