KARACHI: Frantic efforts to make tents for quake survivors
KARACHI, Oct 23: With millions of quake survivors set to spend the winter outdoors, one of the few beneficiaries is Pakistan’s tent industry, already the world’s largest, which is seeing business exceed its wildest expectations.
The government has taken the drastic steps of banning any export of tents and buying them urgently from rival India as it struggles to ward off a second wave of deaths after the October 8 catastrophe which killed over 50,000 people.
But many fear that no matter how many extra hours the factories clock in, there may simply never be enough tents.
H. Nizamdin and Sons, a leading tent manufacturer in the city, has a backlog of 30,000 tents to complete by the end of the month and says it lacks the capacity to produce any more.
“There is huge pressure on us,” company manager Mohammad Siddiqui said. “We have refused fresh orders until November.”
The tank-topped workers in his factory are stretching and stitching at a frantic pace, churning out hundreds of tents each day.
But Siddiqui said work was held back by the holy month of Ramazan.
“In normal circumstances we can even make 1,000 tents a day but not during Ramazan, when we can’t force the labourers into extra work,” Mr Siddiqui said.
More than three million people lost their homes in the earthquake and, with tents and logistics in short supply, the government has declined to promise that all will have makeshift roofs over their heads this winter.
Andrew MacLeod, chief operations officer in the UN emergency response centre in Islamabad, said there were indications that the entire world might not be able to come up with enough tents to confront the humanitarian crisis.
In a cruel economics lesson in supply and demand, there are also signs that companies have been profiteering amid the tragedy.
Sultan Shamsi, the owner of Shamsi Pakistan, another large tent manufacturer, said the prices charged by suppliers had shot up.
“Material suppliers have drastically increased the price of components like pipes and yarn. Now the average cost comes to around 5,500 rupees (92 dollars) from 3,000 rupees (50 dollars) to make a single roof tent and it doubles for a double roof tent,” Shamsi said.
Shamsi has an order of 25,000 tents but he said he might not be able to meet it because of a shortage of material.
“The demand is even much higher than the 1980s during the influx of Afghan refugees,” Shamsi said.
Major-General Farooq Ahmad Khan, the country’s disaster response chief, said that even if the government devoted all of its tents to the victims, some of the shelters might not be appropriate for the Himalayan climate of Kashmir.
Shabab Ahmed, owner of the National Tent company, said that most of the tents were usually exported to Gulf countries or to the United Nations for relief work.
“Pakistan tent manufacturing companies are producing around 30,000 tents per day at the moment,” Mr Ahmed said.
Ordinarily, they would be making 3,000 to 5,000 daily, he said.
Ironically, one of the impediments to making more tents for earthquake victims is that the labourers at the factories were affected by the disaster themselves.
An untold number, possibly thousands, of workers were from the impoverished earthquake-hit areas and had gone to the big cities to earn money and now have returned to their home towns, industrialists said.
Labourer Rahim Pathan, who is working at a Karachi factory, said he understood he was toiling on behalf of other poor people.
“We know that most of those hit by the quake belong to our class, but despite the hard work we may not be able to meet the demands,” he said.
A UN official said other countries, particularly China, were also ramping up production of tents in the wake of the tragedy.
But the groups seeking to help the massive number of displaced people are despairing that there may simply not be enough tents.
“There is a boom in the tent business but manufacturers were not prepared for such a huge demand,” said Nazim F. Haji, who does relief work with City Foundation, a non-governmental organisation.
“We have contacted Nizamdin and some other compaies for 3,000 tents but they refused and said that they were already overbooked,” he said.— AFP
