EQUAL application of law is a pre-requisite for good governance. Our prime minister too has repeatedly spoken of working to that end. So far it has been the misfortune of the people that the law is applied on two different scales — one for the rich and influential and the other for the not-so-rich and ineffectual.

A case in point is the demolition by an MDA (Muzaffarabad Development Authority) team on March 4 of a portion of an underconstruction building, owned by a local resident, Bashir Ahmed, who works as a labourer in Saudi Arabia. The building is located along a link road leading to the accountant-general’s office on a hilltop. The building plan was approved by the city’s municipal corporation which had issued the no-objection certificate.

But here a resident is subjected to a dual system when it comes to any construction on his part. Besides the plan’s approval and the NOC given by the corporation, another NOC from the development authority is required to start construction. And the person has to pay fees twice, i.e to the two civic bodies.

But no government, despite a standing public demand, has ever done anything to rid the people of the curse of paying doubly.

The fact is that the MDA, under the Local Government Act, has no power whatsoever to involve itself in any kind of activity within the municipal limits. But it does so perhaps to “justify” its (now unnecessary) existence. The irony is that the MDA has never bothered about the basic motive behind its establishment in 1988, i.e. development of new housing schemes on the outskirts of the city.

Since its inception the authority has not developed even a single housing scheme. It has rather proved to be a liability on the government which has to arrange funds for the salaries and other perks and privileges of its employees.

Its so-called anti-encroachment section has become a pain in the neck for the public. There are allegations that the needy have to pay to get their work done. Whoever refuses to oblige is threatened with demolition of the building.

The victims, however, are only those who cannot pull the strings. In the present case the demolition of a portion of Mr Bashir’s building is a glaring example of the “pick and choose” policy.

He was allegedly asked to pay Rs50,000 in illegal gratification but on his refusal he had to suffer the consequences. The deputy director maintains that Mr Bashir had violated a condition whereby he was supposed to start construction work 30 feet away from the centre of the (link) road.

The total width of the road is hardly 20 feet, with a steep hill on its other end. Going 30 feet beyond the centre meant he should withdraw 20 feet from his space. What an unjustified and irritating demand!

His is not the only building in that area. Many other buildings already exist on its right and left but these have been spared — obviously not in the service of the law. While the deputy director (estate), who ordered the demolition, although he is not empowered to issue such orders, has recently constructed a palatial building alongside a bustling road in the main old city. But there’s no action against him for the law is for the weak.

In the first place there was no need to demolish the structure even if it was against the plan or the so-called conditions. Such an extreme action cannot be taken unless a notice is served 15 days in advance. And after that period, permission of the chairman and prior intimation to the deputy commissioner is necessary. Neither step was taken. The demolition was carried out at 3 pm and a notice was served at 5:30 pm. That too when the anti-encroachment team came to learn that the aggrieved party had approached newsmen.

This apparently trivial case offers an opportunity to the prime minister and others to act to ensure equal application of the law so that good governance is seen to be working.

Moreover, our superior judiciary which recently provided relief to a court official whose son was allegedly kidnapped and tortured by the son of a high-ranking government official and his friends by taking suo motu notice may take similar steps to provide relief to the common people suffering at the hands of the MDA personnel.

IT is one thing for the federal government to promulgate an ordinance making education up to primary five compulsory, complete with penalties for defaulting parents and erring employers. But it is quite another thing to actually implement and enforce such an ordinance, even in the Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT).

Under the presidential ordinance making primary education compulsory in the ICT, announced earlier this month, parents can be fined a minimum of Rs500 if their primary-school-aged child is not enrolled in any school. Employers can also be fined a minimum of Rs1,000 if they are found to be employing a child who is supposed to be attending primary school. However, it is doubtful at this point in time if the ordinance can be successfully implemented.

In the first place, the appropriate statistics that are required for tracking down those children who are not enrolled in any school are lacking. To track down these children, the government will need to match those children registered in primary schools, both government and private, with the record of live births, to identify those who have not enrolled in any school at all. Neither does the government have a proper registry of births nor does it have an accurate record of the children who are enrolled annually in primary schools. It simply does not have the kind of database to enable it to identify and track down those children who are not enrolled in school.

Collecting this database would require the government to institute a proper system of registry of all births, as well as registry of the annual enrolment in primary schools (both government and private). The local government at the tehsil level, for instance, can be made responsible for keeping a registry of births, as well as a registry of primary school enrolment, in the area under its jurisdiction. This information will have to be regularly obtained by the local government from all the hospitals/clinics and schools under its jurisdiction. The tracking down of children not enrolled in school can then be made at the tehsil government level.

But the problem does not end with just tracking down these children. Once these children are tracked down, it will be an equally, if not greater, uphill task to get parents to enrol their children in schools.

First, the parents will have to be contacted and approached to find out about the child’s schooling arrangements, and if necessary, help them enrol in a school. Some of these children whose names have not been enrolled in any school may have been living overseas while others may be registered in religious or special education schools. Most of those who are not attending school will probably belong to the disadvantaged socio-economic groups whose parents cannot provide the material, moral and environmental support for their children to go to school.

For those parents who do not send their children to school, the government, with the help of NGOs specializing in education or other welfare organizations, will then need to encourage, persuade and help these parents to start sending their children to school. It may be necessary for councillors to make repeated visits to these parents to convince them of the importance of education, and even to give financial aid and other types of assistance.

Many of these parents will be worried that they will incur additional living expenses if they send their children to school. Buying school uniforms, shoes and textbooks, and paying for transport, can be a big disincentive for economically disadvantaged families to send their children to school. For those families who are scraping the barrel to get one meal a day, education is unlikely to be their top priority.

Besides, some of these children may already be contributing to the family income either through begging or working as a domestic helper or in a shop or learning a trade. Sending them to school would mean a double loss for these parents — a loss of the income their child brings home plus the extra expenditure for their schooling.

Even after overcoming the difficulties to get these children into school, there will still be the battle to keep them there. There will be many families who will not be able to afford keeping their children in school for five years. Even if financial assistance schemes are made available to them, these are unlikely to last five years, and these families will find it hard to cope with the additional schooling expenses. Many of them would just give up schooling and go back to more lucrative activities like begging or doing some odd jobs. Studying, anyway, is not exactly a pleasant exercise for these children.

Making primary education compulsory is a noble policy, which the country is in need of. But perhaps the federal government ought to make better preparations before putting such a policy into effect. Not only does it need to have the necessary statistics like numbers of births and school enrolment figures, it should also announce its intention to make primary education compulsory well in advance, at least one academic year before its implementation, so as to give parents time to put their children in school.

Although the presidential ordinance making primary education compulsory is restricted to the ICT, most of the other provinces already have some rule or the other making it obligatory for parents to send their children to primary school. But that this obligation is not being followed is obvious. At present, some 55 per cent of the girls and 37 per cent of the boys in the primary- school-age population throughout the country are not enrolled in any school. This amounts to more than 5.5 million children, and the number is growing every year. These are enormous figures and making primary education compulsory a success under these circumstances requires not only concomitant measures in socio-economic uplift but also a cultural change as well where there is a bias against sending girls to school.

An ordinance should not be instituted for the sake of having that ordinance and feeling good about having it. There is not much point in having an ordinance or rule in which the desired results are not attainable or if the chances of that ordinance or rule being successfully implemented are slim because the socio- administrative infrastructure to implement it is inadequate.

Once a law or directive is put into effect, the government should ensure that it is enforced and implemented. It is better not to have a law or policy at all than to have it and then not enforce it or enforce it only laxly. The cumulative effect of not enforcing government ordinances and directives whole-heartedly has been the lack of citizen respect for the rules and laws of the land, and hence the lack of writ by the government.

THE irrigation department, which used to be one of the most organized departments before partition and played a vital role in boosting the agrarian economy of Faisalabad region, has been turned into a ‘den of corruption’ diminishing its utility to an alarming extent.

The department has seven zones in Punjab. Faisalabad is a major zone catering to the irrigation needs of 3.14 million-acre agriculture land out of 3.83 million acres. It has four circles — the Lower Chenab canal east circle, the LCC west circle, the drainage circle and the Qadirabad circle.

The LCC east circle has a canal system of 1504.77-mile length while the LCC west circle has a length of 1420.72 miles, including the main canal and its distributaries. Similarly, the drainage circle has a length of 1,319 miles, including main drains, branch drains and tributaries. The Lower Chenab canal takes off from the Khanki Headworks at the left side of the river Chenab and caters to an area of 3,688,359 acres in Gujranwala, Hafizabad, Sheikhupura, Faisalabad, Toba Tek Singh and Jhang districts.

The LCC comprises Upper Gogera Branch Canal, Lower Gogera Branch Canal, Burala Branch Canal, Main Line Lower Canal, Lower Chenab canal feeder, Mian Ali Branch Canal, Rakh Branch Canal, and Jhang Branch Canal, which have 2,925 miles length of canals, 7,425 outlets and 417 tails.

The main causes of short supply at tail-ends, apart from the incapacity of channels to convey the required discharges, are increase in irrigation intensity, extraordinary pressure of new farm land under the canal command area, the law and order situation and unplanned cropping patterns.

The designed cropping intensity of the system is 75 per cent with water allowance of 2.84 cusecs/1,000 acres, while the cropping intensity up to 135 per cent has been achieved in the Faisalabad irrigation zone. The irrigators are demanding more water for their lands, which have been developed for cultivation over years of operation of the canal system. But their demands are not being fulfilled due to poor maintenance and lack of upgradation of the system.

There are 5,533 sanctioned posts in the Faisalabad irrigation zone, out of which 1,080 have been lying vacant since long. There is one chief engineer, four superintending engineers, 11 executive engineers, 27 sub-divisional officers, one canal collector, seven deputy collectors, 11 superintendents, 10 divisional accounts officers, 165 sub-engineers, four circle-heads draftsmen, 28 draftsmen, 62 zaildars, three head signallers, 12 electricians, 71 signallers, 612 patwaris, nine plumbers, 34 drivers, 19 artificers, 80 earth workers, 171 mates, 169 gauge readers, 29 barkandaz, 1,412 beldars, 10 boatmen, 44 bullockmen and 37 daffadars. The rest of the employees are non-technical.

The drainage circle has three divisions with 493 beldars on its payroll. However, a majority of them reportedly do private jobs and receive monthly salaries reportedly by greasing the palms of their officers. The irrigation department has a land reclamation division in each region but this section has not been discharging any function worth mentioning for the last many years, and its staff is receiving salary without any work.

It is said that almost all the officers have formed their own contractor companies in the names of their frontmen and awarded them contracts without tenders. Sub-engineers, SDOs and executive engineers show liability of development works and on receiving funds pay the amounts to contractors. They make fudge payments during closure works, under-water masonry works, repairs and earth-laying works on canal banks. They lay 3/4 inches of earth on canal banks and claim exaggerated amounts in feet, and thus embezzle thousands of rupees. From sub-divisional clerks to chief engineers, all receive commission. It is alleged that the SDC, sub-engineer, SDO, accounts clerks, XENs, SEs and the chief engineer receive a total of 50 per cent of the amount of a contract as commission.

The excavator division of the irrigation zone is a major source of corruption involving millions of rupees meant for maintenance of machinery, purchase of spare parts and diesel. The officials concerned allegedly make fudge payments of fictitious firms.

Sub-engineers/SDOs are issued measurement books for recording development works in their sections. However, they maintain more than one measurement book in which they record the details of actual and fudge works.

Sub-engineers and beldars do not bother to take proper care of canal banks resulting in frequent breaches and erosion of the system to an alarming extent. The beldars remain busy in their domestic works or in rearing cattle of sub-engineers and in cutting wood from the canal banks. They often cut trees from canal banks and sell them in timber markets.

Revenue patwaris, zaildars and deputy collectors also allegedly receive bribe by misusing their official position in imposition of water tax and “warabandis”. The revenue patwaris in connivance with the influential farmers charge lower water rates, during gardawaries and thus cause a huge loss to the exchequer. They usually show sugarcane crop as maize crop because the water rate for sugar crop per acre is Rs200 while that for the maize is Rs25 only.

There are three sugar mills functioning in the Lower Canal, and the land cultivated by this canal caters to the need of sugarcane for these mills. But the revenue canal patwaris do not ever show the factual position in their record and maps.

According to insiders in the Faisalabad irrigation zone, there is a loss of 35 to 65 per cent in terms of revenue; in Sheikhupura division it is 60 to 65 per cent, while in Hafizabad and Khaneki division it is 50 per cent. In the Burala and the Lower Gogera divisions, there is 25 to 40 per cent loss in revenue due to corruption and malpractices of the lower staff.

The farming community is totally disappointed by the poor performance and widespread corruption of the irrigation department. Inefficient and corrupt officers, including patwaris, have made their lives miserable due to unnecessary litigation, increase in water rates and reduced supply of irrigation water. The tale-enders are facing a lot of problems and their lands are drying up due to shortage of irrigation water. The influential farmers get their mogas widened by giving bribe to the irrigation staff due to which small land holders do not get their share of water.

The Lower Chenab Canal was designed to irrigate the government waste land, the bulk of which was included in Sandal Bar. It was due to the construction of this canal and its branches and distributaries that the area of Sandal Bar opened up to the rest of the country. The vast tract of waste land studded with gloomy sand dunes was turned, in a short period, into smiling fields and green orchards, mainly because of canal water. The artificial irrigation system set up for colonization of Sandal Bar is no doubt a feat of engineering. But the hardihood of the early settlers who made this achievement possible cannot be ignored. The canal system turned the area of Sandal Bar into Chenab Colony and later on Lyallpur, now Faisalabad, a place of stability and agricultural prosperity.

Currently, the entire system of canals and distributaries of Faisalabad zone is in a deplorable condition. Incidents of breaches have become the order of the day. Ditches and dens of wild animals could be seen along the canal. Heavy bushes and broken embankments betray lack of maintenance. Traditional methods of water sprinkling and dressing of embankments, appear to have been abandoned by the irrigation department, causing loss of precious water. Similarly, encroachments of both kutcha and pucca structures are visible on both sides of canals, drains and sem nullahs.

No beldar or mate is seen supervising the embankments and keeping his bosses well informed. A surprise check of the department’s record will confirm that inspection of canals, rajbahs, minors, canal bungalows and other installations was conducted only in “official documents” to draw a huge amount as travelling expenses and other benefits.

Bathing of animals like buffaloes and cows in canals, which is a cognizable offence, has become a routine matter. Theft of water by influential people is going on with impunity. Whereas plying of bicycles, tongas and carts on the canal ways used to be a serious offence, now regular metalled roads have been laid and opened to traffic. The concept of obtaining permits for use of canal roads has become totally alien.

Accountability is non-existent. A large number of trees from the forest situated along the canal sides have been stolen and sold by the corruption mafia.

Laundry water and sullage and effluents of factories are being discharged into canals freely, forcing the nearby villagers to migrate due to pollution of drinking water.

REFERRING to the police crackdown on the PPP men protesting against the Thal canal project, Ibrat points out that the mass arrest of political activists gives an impression that there is no room for disagreement under the present rule, and cautions that this attitude will add to the problem instead of solving it.

From the very day Ecnec approved the controversial scheme, different political, social and other organizations have been staging protest rallies throughout Sindh. This wave of protest seeks to tell the federal government that whenever an agreement for water-sharing was made, Sindh’s objections were ignored.

In this background, construction of the Thal canal was approved when Punjab was taking water according to the 1994 ministerial decision while paying no heed to Sindh’s insistence on water distribution under the 1991 Accord. The decision to build the canal sends the message to Sindh that water-sharing will continue to be done according to the consent of Punjab only.

This situation compelled opinion-makers in Sindh to stage protest rallies in order to ask President Gen Pervez Musharraf to personally intervene in this matter and review the decision on the canal, besides making it obligatory for the water and power ministry to implement the 1991 agreement. Otherwise the already existing differences between the provinces will deepen, and the country will not be in a position to take strain any further.

Thus, instead of using force against the opponents of the canal project, the federal government should give it a sympathetic consideration. It is a historical fact that the Thal canal project is older than Pakistan and it was rejected even when there was no water crisis in the region, on the ground that it will endanger all forms of natural life in Sindh.

Today when there is an acute shortage of water, due to lack of rain for a couple of years, what water will be left for Sindh after the construction of the canal?

Kawish deplores that due to an unresolved dispute between Sundrani and Bugti tribesmen over the robbery of a tractor, the Bahoo Khoso area in the Jacobabad district has become a war zone. Ironically this conflict has been lingering for the last three years but the government agencies, as well as tribal jirgas, have failed to resolve it. Thus the population of some 10 villages has been consuming their resources and energies on this futile discord.

This situation exposes the absence of the rule of law and the prevailing ignorance in the area. The administration should immediately resolve this conflict and other disputes to prevent bloodshed and provide justice to people so that they do not take law into their hands. Besides, an awareness campaign should be launched in the tribal areas of the province to make the people realize that they cannot gain anything from tribal wars.

Sindhu writes that during his visit of Japan, President Gen Pervez Musharraf announced that Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif would not be allowed to take part in the coming election. He also announced that he was looking for a constitutional way through which he could remain president even after the election. These decisions are bound to affect the electoral process as was feared by some politicians in their meeting with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson.

The Alliance for Restoration of Democracy has termed these decisions unconstitutional and has said it will challenge them in a court of law. This situation is creating apprehensions in the minds of the people. The daily advises the government to let all the political leaders contest the election, and the decision to reject them should be left with the voters.

Commenting on the resolution adopted by the UN Security Council on solution to the Middle East crisis and establishment of the Palestinian state, Tameer-i-Sindh writes that no conflict can be resolved by a UN resolution unless practical steps are taken.

The way the USA has presented the resolution indicates that it has certain objectives behind this move. Hatred against America is multiplying during its war on terror which can prove to be harmful for its security in future, so it is trying to extinguish this fire.

Also it has decided to declare war against Iraq and this resolution might have been presented to divide the possible reaction of Muslim countries. Whatever the case, the Middle East crisis cannot be overcome until Israel gives up its aggressive policy. So another resolution should come forward to urge the US to use its influence to stop the Israeli terrorism.