KARACHI, Oct 30: As the fruits of economic growth claimed by the government remains limited to a few rich of the country, the poor has become poorer to such an extent that a man could not even afford to bury his infant, let alone buy basic necessities of life.
Such an incident recently occurred in a shanty locality of Bin Qasim Town, where an infant died which doctors described as infant mortality-related death but interpreted by police as murder.
The father carried the body of his infant in an old plastic bag as he could not afford to buy a piece of cloth for coffin and headed towards the graveyard wondering if he could get a little space of land to bury his little son free of charge.
The incident reflects the failure of poverty alleviation campaign and hollow claims of government that the country was on the road to economic growth and development registering GDP rate at 8.4 per cent last financial year, as these claims have failed to affect the life of a common man.
Though after the Oct 8th earthquake, the figures might be readjusted on the lower side yet to a common man these figures are meaningless digits, as his life has become rather more difficult with each passing day with rampant unemployment and soaring prices of essential commodities.
About a month back, a young couple had moved to Karachi from Hazara in search of a prosperous life. At the same time, they were looking for a relative already settled in the city, but couldn’t locate him. Soon their hopes of a good life shattered into face of a prolonged joblessness. The couple even could not afford one time meal a day. Whatever savings they had brought from the native town were exhausted in the birth of their first child.
The poor couple lost their first child in infant mortality related death. “We woke up one morning to find our new born pale, we rushed to a nearby hospital where they declared my new born dead, who was yet to be named,” recalled his father, Muhammad Saleem, 24.
“My wife gave the infant final bath, applied powder and wrapped him in an old piece of cloth,” Saleem said recalling that he used plastic bag to carry the body to the graveyard. “On the way to the graveyard, I was stopped by two policemen who opened the plastic bag and saw the body of my infant son, they took me to the police station and lodged a case on me and my wife who was also brought from the house to the police station,” Saleem added.
Subsequently, the body was sent to postmortem examination at the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre to ascertain the cause of death.
The medico-legal officer on duty at the JPMC, Dr Abdul Razzak Shaikh, told Dawn that he was not willing to perform the autopsy of just a two-day-old infant. “I was extremely moved, but had to conduct the autopsy considering the sensitivity attached to the case,” Dr Shaikh said.
The couple had lost their child due to pre-mature delivery and malnutrition, clinical investigations later revealed.
Following the registration of the murder FIR, the case was transferred to the investigation wing of the Bin Qasim town police.
It seems that couple’s miserable conditions were apparently taken into account by the police, who concluded in the course of investigation that the couple was innocent.
“We conducted the investigation and found that they were innocent, subsequently, with the orders of the SSP Investigation, we quashed the FIR against the couple,” Town Investigation Officer DSP Malick Maqsood told Dawn.
