The Pres­i­dent of the San Juan Busi­ness As­so­ci­a­tion (SJ­BA), Vivek Char­ran, is call­ing on the au­thor­i­ties to move quick­ly to end the cur­rent wa­ter short­age in the con­stituen­cy of San Juan / Barataria.

His ap­peal comes on the heels of a sim­i­lar one made this week by Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment for San Juan/Barataria, Sad­dam Ho­sein, who asked the Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties to ad­dress the mat­ter with some ur­gency.

In a state­ment is­sued to­day, Vivek Char­ran de­scribes the wa­ter sit­u­a­tion as crit­i­cal.

“The As­so­ci­a­tion can con­firm that many of our mem­bers have been forced to pur­chase truck borne wa­ter, just to keep their shop doors open,” he ex­plains in the re­lease.  “This is an un­nec­es­sary and hurt­ful bur­den placed on the en­tre­pre­neurs of this coun­try who are try­ing their ut­most to en­sure the na­tion’s econ­o­my re­mains alive.”

He added: “The As­so­ci­a­tion can al­so con­firm a num­ber of busi­ness­es in the com­mu­ni­ty have con­tact­ed the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty on nu­mer­ous sep­a­rate oc­ca­sions, seek­ing re­lief. These pleas have con­tin­u­ous­ly fall­en on deaf ears.”

The SJ­BA pres­i­dent says a ma­jor con­cern fac­ing res­i­dents of San Juan / Barataria af­fect­ed by the wa­ter short­age is that of sani­ti­sa­tion, es­pe­cial­ly be­cause of the cur­rent COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, which de­mands that cit­i­zens con­stant­ly clean and sani­tise them­selves and their en­vi­ron­ment.

“How can we do this with­out wa­ter? The Peo­ple of San Juan/Barataria don’t just want wa­ter. They need it,” he says.  “Eater­ies are now lim­it­ed to “grab and go” or curb­side op­tions un­der the un­der­stand­able health re­stric­tions. And now they must try to op­er­ate with­out wa­ter,” he adds.

Mr Char­ran notes that food busi­ness­es have been hard­est hit by the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, hav­ing been forced to trim their op­er­a­tions down to lean ver­sions of them­selves.

“The As­so­ci­a­tion con­tin­ues to urge the State to al­low the busi­ness­es to earn as best as they can, giv­en the try­ing times hu­man­i­ty faces,” he says.