PART ONE

Lahore and Lahories

Why Must Delhi and Lahore be Declared Twin Cities

Recently, I received an introductory letter from an organisation, which styles itself as the Lahore Sanitation Programme. The objective is simple: Keeping the city clean on a do-it-yourself basis. It is a two-pronged project: To provide an income-generating scheme for unemployed young people, and to work out an effective solid waste disposal system in Lahore.

          The letter says, and I quote:

. . . heaps of garbage lying on roadsides in the city have assumed alarming proportions. This is because of the fact that over 3,000 metric tons of solid waste is being produced in the city every day. With the rapid increase in Lahore, this tonnage will double in the next five years. The Metropolitan Corporation staff is removing only 2,000 tons of solid waste. Now the MCL, which is chronically short of funds, may not be able to buy the requisite machinery for waste management. Thus, we have almost 1,000 metric tons of garbage accumulating every day in the city streets. This is causing serious health and environmental problems.

                In order to tackle this problem, a group of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) operating in the city have launched the Lahore Sanitation Programme. The idea is to assign each zone in Lahore to an NGO. Zones are further sub-divided into wards and managed by community-based organisations (CBOs). Each CBO will be responsible for 1,000 houses initially. It will hire ten local unemployed young people at Rs. 1,500 a month each. Each worker will be allocated one hundred households for service and monitoring. Workers will go door-to-door in the areas allotted to them and solicit membership from householders. Members will be given 15 garbage bags per month, and a pick-up schedule for alternate days for Rs. 25-50 for this months' service. The members will be expected to put their waste in the bags given to them and not to throw it out on the streets. They should then put this bag outside their main entrance for disposal at the scheduled time. The NGOs will be given motorized pick-up, which will be leased privately to remove household waste on alternate days.

                The bags thus picked up by the NGOs will then be disposed of at a central dumping site in the zone from where the MCL trucks will pick them up and cart them to a landfill site outside Lahore .

                We now need help in getting our message across to the people and to make them aware of our programme. We are currently financing the project through donations from multinationals and monthly charges from our members.

Here we are. I've done my bit to get the Lahore Sanitation Programme's plan across to at least the Dawn  readers. Projects like the one described were initiated in Karachi some years ago but here in Lahore it is the first venture of its kind and deserves wholehearted public support.

          The authors of the plan have also sent me clippings of two articles, published by Newsweek  (March 31) on Calcutta and on Delhi (the same date). As the editors say, " India 's famously filthy city of Calcutta is cleansing up and rediscovering some of its old grace. Meanwhile, traffic, disease, and pollution are turning the once majestic capital of Delhi into the new Calcutta.

          How is Calcutta scrubbing itself? As Sudip Mazumdar says, "by paying attention to the little things" which had hitherto been snowballing into intractable social issues. These are staggering figures about Delhi. Sixty percent of its 41 million people lives in illegal or sub-standard houses. The Yamuna, the only source of water to these people is polluted beyond measure. Lactating mothers who drink water from the Yamuna have an intake of DDT, which is 12 times higher than the safe daily limit. In 1996, around 75,000 people died in Delhi of air pollution. Road accidents caused 2,091 deaths in the Indian capital the same year.

          Experts say that water and air pollution will expose 10 to 15 percent of the people in Delhi to cancer. The incidence of bronchial asthma in children has risen by a staggering 300 percent in just five years. Much more pollution is caused by vehicles in Delhi than in Lahore simply because the Indian capital has 2.7 million cars, trucks, motorcycles, auto rickshaws, buses and vans and what have you.

          Mr. Om Prakash, conservationist, holds the politicians responsible for the terrible mess that Delhi finds itself in today. Read " Lahore " for Delhi and you will be on target. Around 470 years ago, Emperor Babur did not have a kind word to say about the Indians (some of them now Pakistanis). I think we like to live in squalor. Mosquitoes and flies don't bother us. We think nothing of easing ourselves against the wall in public. We literally paint our roads and walls red with betel leaf spittle. We revel in throwing our dirt at the neighbour's door. We throw live cigarette butts out the window without a care in the world. We do the same with banana peels. We choke our own severs by disposing of solid waste into them. So what if the roads are and many more reasons, I think Delhi and Lahore should be declared twin cities. Identical twins, I tell you. Brothers in trash. Or is it sisters?

          Talking to reporters or whatever shortly after taking over as prime minister of India, Mr. I. K. Gujral said that the runaway growth in his country's population was keeping him awake at night. He said when he saw the population clock (it is said that there is an electronic population clock in the Prime Minister's office) he could not sleep. He said his government would work hard to control the population growth rate through a literacy campaign aimed at women. He has some hope!

          Prime Ministers before him have been making similar inane proposals without realising that so far as arresting the rate of growth in population is concerned, literacy campaign should be aimed at men, rather than women, it is the father who wants a male heir rather than the mother. It is the man who divorces his wife because she has failed to give him a boy. Those who do not take recourse to divorce keep on producing children until they get a boy. I know of several cases where a son was born after five, six or even more daughters. Most women in India and Pakistan simply cannot say no to their husbands after bearing two daughters. As opposed to the scorpions, among human beings, the male of the species is deadlier by far than the female.

Sunday, May 4, 1997