| 08 January 2005 | Saturday | 26 Ziqa'ad 1425 |
Early warning system
Harassment of artistes
The railway minister's disclosure on Thursday that Pakistan Railways has made a profit of Rs927 million in the first half of this fiscal year is indeed confusing. One says this because the PR had announced an upward revision of its fares only last month.
It said the move was necessary to reduce its losses in the wake of rising petroleum prices. Was the railway minister not aware that the PR had been running in profit for the last six months? Whatever the case, since now the profitability of the railway system has been acknowledged, it is only fair to commuters that the PR withdraw the proposed fare hike.
It ill becomes the public-sector entity to pass on the burden of fluctuating oil prices to commuters, especially when the PR remains heavily dependent on subsidies in the form of State Bank overdrafts.
The profit thus shown for the last six months is accounted for by little more than fare hikes effected all too often, and not as a result of any improvement in the way the system is being run and managed.
Pakistan Railways has long been a sickly enterprise. The minister's assertion that the PR would not be privatized and instead turned into a corporation next year is at once good and bad news.
The good part is that the government is not washing its hands of a national asset anytime soon; the bad part is that commuters can look forward to little reprieve from the way the PR has been run all these years.
By railway high-ups' own admission, the PR cannot expand its passenger service in order to come out of the red because of a lack of infrastructure; instead, it is looking at ways to increase the volume of cargo.
But the main problem with increasing the PR's cargo-carrying capacity is that its tariff is not very competitive. Relatively more efficient modes of goods transport, the National Logistics Cell in the public sector and several others in the private sector, offer door-to-door services at a more reasonable price.
Any increase in the railways' volume of freight will have to be secured by devising and implementing competitive business-enhancement strategies over the longer term. If the past is any pointer, this is where the PR has failed miserably.
What then is the solution? The finance and the railway ministries will have to put their heads together to arrive at a longer-term strategy to save the railway system from going under.
Commercializing PR's land and assets - the golf course and the Mayo Gardens residential estate in Lahore and the railway club in Karachi - or curbing trade unions, are no solutions.
The PR needs to upgrade its infrastructure, reduce its expenditure and take steps to streamline its services. This is necessary for it to become an efficient and reliable mode of travel and goods transport.
False claims of profitability, based largely on fare hikes and manipulation of books, while in reality the PR remains in the red to the tune of Rs14 billion, will not put it back on its feet.
Early warning system
A step long over due has finally been taken. On Thursday, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz set up a committee charged with the task of setting up an early warning system to alert the people and the administration about the possibility of an impending natural calamity.
The focus of the system will be on Pakistan's coastal belt, as is evident from the decision to ask the Institute of Oceanography to set up the system. The Sindh and Balochistan governments will have representatives on the committee, because both provinces share a long coastline and have large fishing communities.
Coming in the wake of the devastating tsunami tidal waves in South and South-East Asia, the decision only serves to highlight our failure to set up a warning system so far.
Luckily, nature has spared Pakistan's coastal belt the kind of disasters that periodically visit such cyclone-prone coasts as those of Bangladesh, the Philippines and America's Gulf of Mexico.
Nevertheless, occasional storms in the Arabian Sea - even of mild intensity - have often caused widespread death and destruction in Pakistan's coastal areas. There are, however, two aspects to this issue: one is advance warning; the other is the post-disaster relief.
While storms can be predicted by modern satellite tracking systems, disasters like earthquakes strike without a warning. Pakistan's northern areas are earthquake-prone, and this means that it is the second point which needs to be given equal importance.
Unfortunately, when it comes to trauma management, it is the Edhi trust and its ambulance and relief teams that jump into action immediately; the government is often conspicuous by its absence.
In the mountainous earthquake-prone regions, access to people needing help becomes a problem because of lack of a government machinery geared to disaster management. While an early warning system will warn the people of a coming storm and manage to save lives, it is the post-disaster action plan whose efficiency will mitigate the people's suffering.
While one hopes that the Oceanography Institute will set up the warning system at the earliest, an equally important task is for the government to set up a disaster management machinery at the national level. It must have the operational ability to respond to disasters immediately and effectively.
Harassment of artistes
Going by recent reports, Multan is not exactly the best place for budding theatre artistes to be. Actors, especially actresses in the city's stage and theatre have been facing a very tough time from an overzealous local administration.
Shows have been banned and theatres shut down initially by the authorities. Then, a kind of compromise was agreed upon, according to which actresses were given guidelines on how to dress, the number of dances in a play were reduced to four and with restricted hand and feet movement.
Now, the official, a local education department bureaucrat, in charge of a monitoring committee set up by the Multan district administration, has come up with the extraordinary suggestion that actresses who bear the names of holy personages have to change these if they want to continue in the profession.
His reason is that their acting defiles the sanctity of their names and hence they must choose one or the other: either the names or acting. In fact, it has also been reported that the said official told the actresses that the next time they appear before the committee, they must wear a veil and should have performed ablution.
Such shenanigans by officials give the impression as if the president is the only individual in the government who believes in 'enlightened moderation' and that the rank and file either do not share his views or wilfully indulge in actions that contradict them.
Misguided and wholly senseless attempts to curb so-called obscenity and vulgarity are nothing new in Pakistan, especially by activists of religious parties, but it does become worrying when government officials don the mantle of guardian of public morality.
The harassment of theatre performers in Multan must stop and the monitoring committee immediately disbanded. Such interference is not only tantamount to misuse of official authority but also stifles the one avenue for entertainment the city's residents have.