An integrated Child Protection System – Pakistan
August 9, 2024
Firefighting versus child protection systems
August 28, 2024

Simple lessons

Naeem Sadiq Published August 24, 2024

Simple lessons – Newspaper – DAWN.COM

Imagine a country where 99.9 percent citizens cannot file their complex and convoluted tax returns without hiring the services of tax lawyers.   Imagine a country whose Railway operates with 315 employees per train but refuses to learn from the Japanese who perform the same task with only 5.9 employees.   Imagine a country that is stuck with a burgeoning Total Fertility Rate of 3.6, but will remain oblivious to how Bangladesh reduced its TFR from 6.9  in 1971 to 1.9 in 2024. Imagine a country whose Supreme court operates with 833 employees but will not consider how the British Supreme Court works with only 64 employees on its payroll.   Imagine a country that gives 150,000 government vehicles as a bribe to its officials – a wastefulness not indulged by any other country.  Imagine a country that provides less than minimum wage to 60% of its workers but will not ponder about why Switzerland jailed a multi-billionaire for denying minimum wage to a single employee.

 

If there is one Pakistani who shattered this reclusive cycle, looked outwards and learnt to compete with the best in the world, it was a boy from a mud brick home of Mian Channu.  The results were brilliant and outstanding.   Most Pakistanis, however, appear to have given up and succumbed to a state of Learned helplessness. So here is a simple, feasible and indigenous proposal.   It is to force the Prime Minister and the entire parliament to spend a week (at their own expense) in a valley of awe-inspiring natural beauty and crystal-clear rivers, nestled amidst Pakistan’s majestic Karakoram mountains, called the Hunza valley.   There are numerous immensely useful lessons they can learn from Hunza that can be emulated in the rest of the country, on a self-help basis and without begging the IMF for one more cent.

 

The first and the foremost lesson we can learn is to stop releasing 99.9 percent of our entire untreated raw sewage into ponds, lakes, nullahs, rivers and ocean.   Hunza treats 100 percent of its sewage and does not let a drop trickle down to pollute the heavenly Hunza River or the breathtakingly beautiful Attabad lake.  Each set of shops, buildings, homes and villages have their own dual septic tanks, confining the sewage and enabling the sludge to be used as fertiliser.  On the contrary, Karachi’s proposed S-III sewage treatment project that began its life with a budget of Rs. 8 billion in 2007 has already crossed Rs. 45 billion mark – with nothing to show on the ground.  The existing ‘sewerage’ thinking, driven by contractual kickbacks, lust for foreign loans and a dysfunctional bureaucracy has accomplished zero sewage treatment in 76 years.  We could emulate the Hunza model (and its improved version of constructed wetlands) in every town and village of Pakistan at a negligible cost.

 

One does not see any obscene double-cabin ‘Vigos’ with gun-toting goons on the streets of Hunza. Carriage and display of weapons is prohibited and rigidly implemented – a much-needed lesson that could be learnt by the rest of Pakistan.  Every few weeks our provincial governments make phoney announcements prohibiting carriage and display of weapons. The Karachi DHA spent millions to display thousands of ‘Say No to Guns’ posters every few hundred yards.  But there is never an intent or resolve behind these ‘eyewash’ measures, resulting in an escalating proliferation of weapons and violence. Can we not learn from Hunza?

 

Karachi deploys about 12000 contracted sanitation workers to clean the trash that we are allowed and even encouraged to throw on our streets.   These workers receive less than half the legal minimum wage, no EOBI and no social security. Their lives could well be at par, if not worse than the sixteenth century slaves.  How does Hunza clean its streets?  Firstly, littering is prohibited.  Secondly, shops, homes and the adjoining areas are cleaned by the residents themselves. Thirdly garbage is retained indoors, packed in bags and placed at a designated location in each street, from where it is collected by municipality vans at a fixed hour each day.  Thus a sensible government and an aware and motivated citizenry save billions of Rupees every month. This self-help system makes the Hunza streets cleaner than those in most towns in Pakistan. Can we emulate the Hunza street cleaning model?

 

Unlike the 28 million out-of-school Pakistani children, every Hunzai child goes to a school. The literacy level is 90 percent, a factor that helps in spreading and understanding civic and environmental instructions and issues. There is a huge downstream impact clearly manifested in smaller families, cleaner public toilets, orderly queues and courteous policemen.  A huge credit for Hunza’s development goes to the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) for its thoughtful focus on education, environment and more recently on software, digital technology, high speed internet and solar power plants to replace the diesel power generation.  Pakistan too can begin to learn, emulate and compete with the best in the world – as brilliantly demonstrated by the boy from Mian Channu and the heavenly valley of Hunza.