NAZIMS of union councils have been making efforts to run public matters under the devolution plan, but no practical steps have been taken by them to make the councils work according to the Punjab Local Government Ordinance, 2001, either due to lack of knowledge or inability to understand their duties and powers.

Union council-wise, Faisalabad is the biggest district of the country. But none of its Nazims, Naib Nazims and councillors has initiated any work for the benefit of the people or carried out any function envisaged in the Local Bodies Ordinance.

A sum of Rs35,000 was granted by the government for each union council about a fortnight ago for opening joint accounts of Nazims and recently appointed secretaries. But they are unable to spend it because of lack of proper knowledge or guidance and restrictions imposed by the government.

About 85 per cent of the union councils have, so far, not set up proper offices despite the passage of one-and-a-half month, though the government has granted permission for setting up such offices in rented buildings.

Abolition of the offices of deputy commissioners, commissioners and magistrates in itself was not enough. What was needed was an effective follow-up system to make the whole programme work smoothly for the well-being of the citizens.

Take the case of domiciles, identity cards, arms licences and traffic challans. Hundreds of people are running from pillar to post to get these tasks done. The transfer of record and assets from the defunct district council, municipal corporation, town committees and other departments to the union councils seems to be moving at a snail’s pace. In the absence of record, the offices of Nazims could not even start work.

According to a survey conducted by this correspondent, the record of births, deaths and marriages has not been shifted to union councils by the defunct local councils. The authorities were supposed to hand over files and record of such nature to Nazims and Naib Nazims positively by Aug 14.

A dozen Nazims and Naib Nazims, including Shrafat Ali Khattak, Aazam Yaseen, Tariq Bashir Ghauri, Saleem Shahid, Muhammad Shakeel and Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali, complained that they were helpless to run the affairs of their respective union councils as the National Reconstruction Bureau and other authorities had failed to provide them with the required information for the smooth functioning of union councils.

They had not yet received proper sketches, machinery and staff for the collection of taxes, fees, levies and record of proceedings against defaulters and violations of newly-framed laws of local government.

All the UCs had been asked by the district government and revenue officers to prepare annual budgets and finalize development projects and discharge their functions, but the Nazims were not aware of their areas and source of income because none of the defunct local councils had transferred funds and taxes as planned. The defunct local councils were still collecting a number of fees and levies with impunity which should have been stopped by them immediately after Aug 14.

They alleged that orders issued by them for launching cleanliness campaigns, providing proper guidance to the people in government departments and such like other steps were also not being implemented in letter and spirit by the responsible functionaries. They claimed that over 90 per cent union councils had, so far, conducted their first session only and were puzzled how to exercise their powers.

If the government was keen to see that the new system succeeded, it should have launched a comprehensive plan for providing the required infrastructure to union councils. Otherwise the entire practice would become an exercise in futility, a retired local government official apprehended. He said the bureaucracy was deliberately creating hurdles in the way of proper running of the new system to claim that it was not workable.

Under the new system, union council Nazims were authorized to take legal action in almost 80 offences and were also empowered to refer any case to a judicial magistrate for initiating proceedings against the violators.

The cases or offences which union and tehsil Nazims can refer to the tehsil judicial magistrate relate to issues like environment, forgery and tax-evasion.

The offences in which the Nazims have been authorized to take action include irremovable encroachment on local government property; manufacturing, storing or trading in firecrackers or any other dangerous material; discharging such material in any drain or public water course; overcharging or illegally charging any tax, fee; preparing or using counterfeit forms of local government for recovery of taxes; constructing a building in a backward area; failure to demolish a building which has been declared dangerous by the local government; failure of commercial concerns to provide adequate and safe disposal of effluents; establishing a parking stand on any property controlled by the local government; and supplying drinking water for human consumption from any source which is contaminated and injurious to human health.

The Nazims are also empowered to take action against a person who sets up a cattle-shed without the permission of the local government; fails to return possession of property to the local government on cancellation of his contract; and sets up any restaurant or vending stall for eatables on any road, street or footpath without permission.

They can also recommend action against fixing of wooden stalls, plying of hand-carts for sale of goods; setting up a brick-kiln or lime kiln near residential areas; slaughtering of animals for sale at a place other than that fixed for it; cutting down of a tree or a branch thereof which may cause annoyance to the public, stocking or collecting timber, dry grass or other inflammable materials adjacent to residential areas; tax-evasion; preparation and sale of articles of food by a person apparently suffering from any contagious disease.

Permission of a Nazim is must in such matters as laying a drain or building a road, burial or cremation of a body at a place other than the specified place. Failure to furnish on request information in respect of any matter which a local government is authorized to call for or furnishing wrong information can attract punishment. Other matters falling in the union council jurisdiction are disposal of carcasses of animals within prohibited distance; failure to dispose of fat or any organ or part of a dead animal at a public place; failure to maintain clean premises of the area in front of a shop, an office or a public street. Manufacturing, keeping or selling of wire thread meant for kite-flying are also included in the list of offences.

Playing loud music, drum beating, blowing horn, shouting, using abusive language, causing distress to the inhabitants of neighbourhood, begging for alms by exposing any deformity or disease for soliciting charity, failure of the head of a family to report birth and death to local government, keeping pigeons or other birds in a manner causing danger to air traffic will also be liable to punishment.

A senior lawyer said Nazims and councillors were making hue and cry without reading the scripts of their duties and powers envisaged in the Local Government Ordinance. He said the new system was based on creating awareness among the public for involvement in welfare-oriented projects and enabling the people to decide their fate with consensus. In fact, the newly-elected UC members were reluctant to take into confidence the entire communities of their areas due to their own shortcomings, contradictions and decades-old factional and biradri prejudices, he said.

He said the devolution plan forced the elected representatives to involve the area people by constituting various committees and boards. But none of the councils had taken steps in this respect. They appear to be reluctant to involve the public because of their own shyness and traditional intolerance.

At the moment, union councils are without adequate financial resources which have to be generated either by imposing taxes or collecting donations for uplift works on the pattern of matching grants. But the UC members seem to be incapable of accomplishing this task. Just to escape their duties, they are making a fuss about lack of funds, infrastructure, assets, rules of business, not realizing that all these responsibilities were supposed to have been discharged by them.

IMAGINE a formula being devised to measure the performance and capability of persons belonging to a particular profession, let us say doctors, lawyers, teachers, journalists or even soldiers. Based on this formula, suppose the persons from each profession are then rated and ranked nationally in order of “merit”, beginning from number one at the top and down to however many number of persons there are registered in that particular profession.

Imagine then these ratings are published in the form of annual public catalogues, where any doctor, lawyer, teacher, journalist or soldier can refer to find out his rating position among the people of his own profession. It could be first, or fifth, or five-hundredth, or one-thousand-and-five-hundredth, or a humiliating rock bottom last.

This is not fiction. It is reality here in this country. Such a catalogue actually exists for rating scientists nationally. It is prepared and published by the Pakistan Council for Science and Technology (PCST) in Islamabad. The first edition entitled Leading Scientists of Pakistan, published in 1999, was available to the public at Rs110 and the second edition entitled Scientific Research in Pakistan, published in 2000, can be bought for Rs300 a copy. The catalogues can also be found in libraries around the country.

Science, with all its varied branches, is a serious subject. There seems little point in compiling a list rating scientists just like Forbes’ list rating the richest men in the world. Yes, by all means have annual awards like “top scientist(s) of the year,” but rating scientists and publishing this in the form of a catalogue is a meaningless, if not damaging, exercise.

In the first catalogue, the scientists were actually ranked nationally from number 1, who had the highest rating according to the formula, to the last, number 124, who had 0 rating. In fact, the last 12 scientists embarrassingly had 0 rating.

Although the second catalogue published in 2000 did away with this kind of ordered ranking, it contained a list of 1,813 scientists in alphabetical order, with their respective ratings beside their names, disciplines and organizations. Out of this number, half of the scientists — 920 of them — had 0 rating! Many others had ratings of less than 1.0, while the highest rating was 445.

In effect, these public catalogues of scientists can be likened to the lists of matric or FSc examination results published annually in the newspapers. Matric and FSc students are at least saved the embarrassment of their names appearing in print, since only their roll numbers are published next to their results. Needless to say, the catalogues have caused considerable humiliation and distress to many a scientist.

Besides, the PCST had obtained from the majority of scientists their curriculum-vitae and bio-data to calculate their rating without their knowledge that information would be used in calculating their performance, and without their consent that information would be used in rating them nationally. In other words, permission was not sought from the majority of scientists to publish information about them as listed in both the catalogues.

The PCST argues that such a quantitative evaluation of individual scientists is needed to link research contribution with career advancement, promotions and conferment of national awards and distinctions. Well, why is it that Pakistan seems to be the only country in the world to have realized this need? Why is it that none of the scientifically developed countries have embarked on a similar exercise?

In fact, foreign scientists who have come to know of the PCST’s catalogues have criticized the exercise. This is because the formula that the PCST has adopted to calculate and judge the performance of scientists is biased, defective and deceptive. The formula, known as Impact Factor, was originally invented and used by an institute in Philadelphia in the United States to compare journals within the same field. It is simply not used, nor recommended to be used, to compare the work of individual scientists and rate them the way that PCST has done.

The amazing thing is that the PCST itself admits that there are serious drawbacks and limitations in the formula, though it still argues for and insists on its use on the basis that the numerical evaluation gives better objectivity in evaluating scientists. But it is precisely the very shortcomings of the formula that make the numerical evaluation subjective and unfair.

How does the PCST explain the fact that when the formula that is being used to evaluate the local scientists is applied to evaluate foreign scientists, it is found that some of the famed and top scientists in the West who have made notable and legendary contributions in their respective research fields have a much lower rating than scientists in Pakistan of the same discipline?

On the other hand, there are some Pakistani scientists, well recognized internationally for their research work, who have a very low rating based on the formula. This is because the nature of their disciplines and work, or the journals that they publish in, which may be of very good international repute in their respective disciplines, just do not give them a high rating according to the PCST’s formula.

Everywhere else in Pakistan, and everywhere else in the world, evaluation of any official or employee for promotion or recommendation for any award or grant is done on the basis of annual confidential reports or / and peer evaluation, the latter meaning review by acknowledged experts in the respective fields. How come it is that in the domain of science in Pakistan a decision has been taken by a handful of influential scientists, without a genuine debate / discussion on it, to use a formula, and a highly defective one at that, to evaluate numerically the performance of scientists?

The motivation and rationale behind the PCST’s publication of the catalogues is highly suspect. It appears that the objective is political, i.e. to exclude certain scientists or a group of scientists from the top scientific scene, rather than any real attempt at evaluating scientists’ performance for the eventual betterment of science in the country.

HUNGER is broadly divided into two groups, a natural hunger that all of us feel when the stomach ideally designed to process periodic batches of food, is empty after four hours of meal intake and the other type when the foods’ unavailability prolongs for days after days with constant painful gastric contractions in the absence of nutrients which further trigger the hunger.

Of course, the Food and Agricultural Organization this year addresses the latter chronic type of the hunger that has become a global problem. Most of us are unaware that about 800 million people the world over do not have enough to eat and thus suffer all sorts of ailments, including severely dangerous ones leading to death.

Fortunately, some international organizations are deeply concerned about the tragic deaths due to starvation. One such organization, FAO, celebrates World Food Day each year on Oct 16 to deliver a universal message related to common sufferings of humanity. The theme how rightly captured for 2001 is “Fight Hunger to Reduce Poverty”, in view of the fact that poverty is a worldwide problem or better called a disease although not contagious, however certainly chronic.

Some of the causes of hunger are shown below:

Hunger should be categorized as an ailment because if continued for long it makes the body so weak that most of the potentials and abilities for living are drastically lost, leaving life just crippled. Modern nutrition has also shown that hunger is extremely dangerous for infancy and childhood as the malnourished brain at the stage of development if not fed gets badly damaged and the child’s intellectual level or learning capacity remains low even if the food is available in later part of the life. This is a chain process of degeneration of nations, specially in the Third World countries.

We now can appreciate the theme that hunger generates poverty because a starving person is naturally giving poor mental and physical performance, thus overall national work done is much inferior to what is expected. Thus the tackling of hunger will gradually overcome the problem of poverty.

These national and international deficiencies are so much interacted and linked to each other that the global network of problems is formed and has to be solved mutually. At present it is elaborated that a problem faced by one country has the answer lying in the other part of the world and it teaches us the lesson that the yawning gap between understanding each other must be minimized.

The foods for thought to find some solutions to fight against hunger are discussed. It is appropriate to begin with a Hadees: A man suffering from hunger came to the Holy Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), holding a kashkol in his hand and asking for some food. The Prophet (PBUH) took the kashkol and sold it to another person. The money so procured was given to the hungry person, with the advice that he first buy a kulhari (axe) and cut wood in the forest, get the money by selling it to get the food. The lesson: one has to work even if one is hungry.

It is logical to discuss the span of national problems of hunger for elimination of poverty and specially focusing the goal-oriented suggestions.

NATIONAL RESOURCES: We are well aware that some of our natural indigenous resources are undermined. We have to explore them for enhanced productivity.

i. Farm lands: We often do not use the available agricultural fields for multiple crop productivity. The land is supposed to be in use throughout the year. It needs masterminds with thorough knowledge of horticulture to preplan the series of crop productivity, one after the other. It is now known that harvesting a specific crop nourishes the land for growing another one and so on.

ii. Biotechnology: During the last few decades, the science of biotechnology has provided methodologies that the productivity of biomass may be reduced to hours / days and through the tissue culture techniques variety of crops may be grown at the very economical costs.

iii. Industrial processing: Similarly some industrial plants may be used for handling more than one type of the raw materials to produce different end-products. For example, a juice processing plant may work round the year if selection of fruits or vegetables is according to the seasons. The juice extraction unit may differ for each item but some of the units like storage, washing, pasteurization and packaging will resemble and may be used for multipurpose.

iv. Marine wealth: We are quite ignorant about our marine resources — not only about fish, prawns but about seaweeds also. The use of extremely nutritious, economical and easily available foods as the seaweeds is a part of the common meal in Japan, China and other Southeast countries. We hardly know about them?

Utilization: We all know that we eat only a small portion of a number of foods or vegetables while a reasonable part is just wasted although it is non-toxic, some times even nutritious as well. It is not liked in view of its unpalatable taste like those of covers or peels of fruits. The orange peel and seeds are an example which may technically be modified into a variety of products such as juices, dietary fibres (in powder form) and breakfast foods.

In this modern world of technology, food science is advanced to an extent that flavour are modified or altered. Seeds of fruits and vegetable are a good source of protein. In fact, the seeds of the sunflower and pumpkin are sold as health food. Similarly, cakes (solid mass) after extraction of the oil from most of the seeds is edible after modification.

Food from waste: The inedible item such as wastepaper, corn-cob and wood-dust are convertible into high class proteins through the process of fermentation. The above three sources are cellulosic compounds and may be converted to glucose by appropriate microorganisms. The glucose solution with addition of some minerals is converted to edible biomass rich in protein again by the selection of proper bacteria or the fungi. This is how food is generated from waste.

Conversion: Human beings need a variety of food from the health point of view. It is possible to alter technically or biotechnologically one food into another. For example, an industrial process called extrusion produces a variety of snack foods from different cereals and legumes. The uncommon, less consumed cereals and legumes are usable as well to produce different foods.

Income generation: It is a common practice in advanced countries that every adult of a family is an earning member and so finances are mutually shared. Similarly, we also should encourage women to generate financial resources. Also, children after the age of eighteen may contribute. Thus compulsive income generation will not only be helpful in meeting a number of expenses but float a sense of responsibility.

Conclusion: How true are the words from Jacques Diouf, director-general of FAO: “We cannot assume that hunger will disappear as a byproduct of the poverty elimination. A sharper focus is needed on hunger and agriculture development within the broader objective of poverty reduction.”

The aims and the objectives of the celebration of the World Food Day are noble and worthy of sharing, propagating and implementing at the world community level to unitedly struggle for the unanimous target that “every one of us in every corner of the world has enough to eat”. With this satisfaction of satiety, the poor will also be able to work hard to eliminate poverty.

The writer is the Head, Department of Nutrition, Baqai Medical University, Karachi.

KHAJOOR Bazaar, one of the oldest markets of the city, situated near the roundabout of Lea Market, is always choked with customers, most of whom come here from Balochistan for shopping.

For years an old man, a resident of the city, had not gone beyond Khajoor Bazaar. Once a customer while strolling landed on Bunder Road. He was surprised to find himself in a new place. And he was horrified to see people spitting blood. He rushed, on a camel, to his village to tell villagers that everyone in Karachi city was spitting blood and breathing short. Actually people were chewing betel-leaves and were squirting out red betel-leave juice. Another simple-minded Baloch villager saw lots of cars, buses and motorcycles running at a fast speed on the city roads, and he thought that large numbers of people were leaving the city because plague had broken out. He asked people in his village to see Karachi.

The Balochis have their own culture, and they do not want it to be adulterated by Western culture. The bazaar takes its name from Khajoor, date in English. Most of the date sellers in the bazaar are Balochis. However, this fruit, locally known as a fruit of the heaven, is sold in unhygienic conditions. The sellers, with their goods, sit surrounded by dirty conditions. There is no arrangement to protect this delicious fruit from being swarmed by flies.

The Balochis have made important contribution in all spheres of life. They have produced great artistes such as Faiz Baloch, Amen Toot, Zarina Baloch, Jharok and several others, who have enriched art and culture by giving them their best. Faiz Baloch and Jharok had inimitable style of folk singing. But they were not honoured and died unsung.

The shopkeepers of Khajoor Bazaar, despite going through the vicissitude of time, have not changed their simple life style. Khajoor Bazaar has not lost its identity.

There was Agha Mehmood’s eating-house. He was a famous footballer and a great patron of the Keamari Union Football Club. There was Nadri Hotel there. There was another eating-house, Lea Hotel, situated near Khajoor Bazaar. Their food was known far and wide for its taste and aroma. Though these eating-houses and hotels have disappeared, their memory remains fresh.

LAHORE has welcomed within its fold many talented musicians. Among them were famous sarangi players Ghulam Muhammad Qasuri, Chhotey Kaley Khan, Balley Khan and his son, Barkat Ali, Channu Khan, Nabi Dad Khan, Mehar Din Khurshid and Haider Bakhsh Faloosay Khan. They were either living in the city before August 1947 or arrived to settle here permanently.

Sarangi-nawaz Ustad Haider Bakhsh Faloosay Khan lived in Mohalla Shian, near Chowk Nawab Sahib, inside Mochi Gate, where a few members of his fraternity also lived. The burly and unassuming Khan Sahib was employed by Radio Pakistan, where he spent his entire life playing the sarangi, either solo or providing accompaniment to frontline classical vocalists of the sub-continent.

Those were the days when Faloosay Khan would stop in the morning at the shop of Sheeda Halwai at the mouth of Mochi Gate, to have breakfast, comprising halwa-puri and a kulcha, which cost four annas (25 paisas). For those who have not seen annas and pies in circulation: a rupee in those days was worth 16 annas under the previous monetary system. With one rupee, four people could enjoy a sumptuous breakfast from the shop of Sheeda Halwai in those days.

Issueless, Faloosay Khan had two passions in life, rearing quails and playing the sarangi. As a young man, I have seen the late Khan Sahib in action both at Radio Pakistan, at privately sponsored functions and at Takia Mirasian outside Mochi Gate. His fingers were fat, but they were agile and melodies created by them on the sarangi were so sweet that they went straight to the heart of the listener. So dedicated was he to his profession and such a keen perception of tone had he developed that he would not brook an off-key singer or instrumentalist. Unassuming and reticent, Falossay Khan was known as a dervish among professional musicians.

Ustad Haider Bakhsh was a musician of great qualities. He was madly in love with his art and always played the sarangi feelingly with the result that his presentations had an enduring impact on the audiences. His high quality musicianship won him many friends from amongst connoisseurs, professional musicians and lay music fans.

The art of sarangi playing is very difficult and thankless because of the sharp decline in the popularity of classical music. The invention of a number of electrophonic instruments, including synthesizers, which have pleasing tones, has further reduced the demand for the sarangi. The sarangi is one of the oldest and most sought after musical devices the classical vocalists prefer to have as an accompanying instrument as they believe that it can give a hundred tonal colours (timbre). According to a universally accepted notion, the perfect musical sound created by nature is the human voice, which is capable of creating the subtlest and the most intricate shades of musical sounds while expressing a variety of moods and emotions. The sarangi is the only man-made device which, in the hands of a competent player, can produce all kinds of pleasing and melancholic melodies. The sarangi player is expected to follow the voice, but mostly during pauses, and at times along with the song itself, he plays some florid passages of his own.

The sarangi’s current shape is said to be a metamorphosis of the old instrument, which changed into a highly developed form of ancient musical device called chikara that is still popular in remote areas of the Punjab and Sindh. However, there is a qualitative difference in the tones produced by a sarangi and a chikara, which is also smaller in size.

The sarangi that is in use these days is a couple of feet long, but there are some, which are a little longer. Its body is hollowed out of wood, the resonator being covered with animal skin, and the fingerboard with wood. It is played as a violin inverted with a bow; although the bow is heavier and different in shape and construction than that of a violin. It has three main gut strings varying in thickness, which are tuned to the lower octave. No pressure is applied on the strings, but stopping is produced by sliding the finger nails against the sides of the string while bowing.

A sarangi has often been equated with the violin of the West. However, this comparison falls short as it does not do justice to the sonic enchantment of an eastern sarangi, which is capable of producing subtle tonal colours associated without melodic system.

Ustad Haider Bakhsh Faloosay Khan was born in Kasur in 1900 in a family of professional musicians and leant the art of playing this delicate instrument from his elders. He joined a touring theatrical company before the advent of the talkies in the sub-continent. He worked for several companies, which exposed him to different musical trends in those days. Later, he worked as a saparda (accompanist) with Inayat Bai Dheruwali, the queen among female classical vocalists of Lahore of his day. The setting up of film studios in Lahore changed the direction of his career as he worked in the orchestras of several film composers. Finally, he settled down at Radio Pakistan from where he retired shortly before his death in 1961.