RAWALPINDI, Dec 31: The living and the dead are facing the same problem in the garrison city of Rawalpindi. Both residential accommodation and burial space is in short supply.

While high rents keep pushing the living to the outskirts of the city the dead are being squeezed into ever shrinking graveyards majority of which have no plots left for digging new graves.

There are 53 graveyards in the city of which 31 are in municipal and the remaining 22 in cantonment areas occupying around 308 acres of land. This is just about 1.79 per cent of the city’s total area.

The shortage of burial space in the present graveyards is due not only to limited space versus the growing population but also because of lack of proper space planning and regular maintenance.

Encroachments on graveyard space due to absence of proper boundary walls and collusion of authorities with private builders has further aggravated the situation. This is resulting in increasing incidence of desecration of old graves as every time a new grave is dug up an old grave with its skeletal remains is exposed.

The Dhoke Ratta graveyard has the worst space problem among others. The situation in the three graveyards under the Auqaf Department is hardly different. The department is cognisant of the problem but has no solution.

The Zonal Administrator, Auqaaf, Mian Sharafat Hussain, told Dawn that there was acute shortage of graveyards in the city making burial of the dead a great problem for the bereaved families.

There was urgent need for acquiring land for new graveyards as the existing ones would be absolutely full in the next three or four years, he said. He accused civic bodies of negligence in this respect.

The Khyyaban-i-Sir Syed has no proper burial site. The Naib Nazim of the locality, Sohail Pasha, criticised municipal authorities for not constructing a boundary wall around the graveyard which was causing loss of land due to erosion.

He said that in 1996, the former Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, had ordered acquisition of 20,000 kanals of land near Nak Dhamial for a new graveyard but successive regimes paid no attention to the plan which could have met the needs for many years.

He urged concerned authorities to acquire the required land for new graveyards urgently.