Kot Nizam could very well hold the key to development for Pakistan’s rural outback
RURAL Development Policy Institute with its head office in Islamabad and a regional office in Pindi Bhatian, is the brain child of an idealistic young man by the name of Amjad Bhatti who is convinced that he and his colleagues possess the will and determination coupled with a vision and a mission that is destined to change the way people go about living in the rural areas of Pakistan.
These fellows are full of ideas and carry fire in their belly. When I asked the young men if they had something to show for other than few workshops and a couple of newsletters, their eyes lit up. And before I could realize, I had fallen into the trap. Irfan Maqbool, my friend at RDPI, innocently inquired if I was ready to take a day trip to a place called Kot Nizam.
“What is in Kot Nizam?” I asked.
“You will see!” came the reply in the form of a chorus.
They made a few phone calls and informed me promptly that I should go and see a gentleman at their regional office in Pindi Bhatian who would arrange for a guide to take me to Kot Nizam.
The next morning I was on my way to Pindi Bhatian, which is the tehsil headquarters of District Hafizabad. Hafizabad incidentally is one of the most impoverished and backward districts of Punjab. No wonder they have selected for a site near Pindi Bhatian. After all charity should begin at home.
Pindi Bhatian is about a hundred and thirty kilometres from Lahore, a 75-minute drive if one is to take the Motorway. Being familiar with the town, I was able to locate the office within no time and after exchanging pleasantries with my host, I was on my way to Kot Nizam accompanied by the guide provided to me. By that time I had a vague idea what to expect at Kot Nizam.
The first leg of our journey to Kot took us about four kilometres on the Pindi Bhatian-Hafizabad road. From there we took a recently constructed road, under the ‘Khushal Pakistan’ scheme, which zigzagged its way through a pale sea of undulating ripened munji (rice) with sprinkles of green fodder fields surfacing here and there. Everything was so quiet around us as if someone had clicked the mute button on. Tranquillity and serenity reined with all its might!
My companion, a retired Subedar-Major of Pakistan Army, affectionately referred as Haji Sahib, finally broke the silence and told me about the Kot Nizam project. “You see this channel, it is eight kilometres long, and we (RDPI) built it with our own resources and community help.” A charged up Haji Sahib went on to describe the project.
Kot Nizam project was undertaken to alleviate the hardships faced by the people of this area, especially Kot Nizam. Their troubles started with the construction of Islamabad-Lahore Motorway and the embankments built along the way. The Motorway planners neglected to provide alternate drainage arrangement during the construction of Motorway. Resultantly, Kot Nizam, the worst affected of the twelve adjoining villages, effectively became an island surrounded by rain and floodwaters of Chenab. For several years, a large tract of land, approximately 800 acres of both cultivated and un-cultivated, including village settlements remained inundated. What made life even more difficult for the people of Kot Nizam was un availability of a road to get in and out of the village.
The government’s apathy to address the problems of a non-entity like Kot Nizam, with only eight hundred people with a lonely post-matriculate person in the entire village, is not all surprising. There are hundreds if not thousands of such villages where humanity suffers at the hand of man-made and natural disasters without anyone noticing it or doing anything about it.
“You see the people of Kot Nizam had to wait for the dawn to bury their dead as it was not possible to carry a funeral through knee high waters at night” I was told. “Villagers faced enormous difficulty in marrying their sons and daughters, no one wanted to attend a marriage ceremony in wet clothes,” commented Haji Sahib as we came to a halt at a graveyard.
A signboard outlining the details of the project welcomed us at the mouth of the brick surfaced road leading to Kot Nizam. Interestingly, there were a handful of wann or peelu (Salvadore-persica) in and around the graveyard. With the exception of that place I had not seen that particular kind of tree during the journey leading to Kot Nizam.
“Building this road was not exactly an easy task”, Haji Sahib went on without giving me any respite. “You see, it is extremely difficult to convince a Jat to part with his land, we faced a lot of difficulty in convincing people to give up their land for the road, and if it was not for one particular individual, Master Bashir, this project would have failed.”
Master Bashir is the local schoolteacher and a minor landlord — the only ‘educated’ person in the entire village. A couple of minutes later, a newly constructed brick building was in sight. This was the community centre. It has room for a dispensary, a training centre and central meeting area.
The news of our arrival brought many youngsters at the community centre, a couple of them carrying two wooden cots and another carrying a jug of milk and glasses. Master Bashir joined us shortly accompanied by the son of lambardar. There was something different about the group of men that I met that day; unlike their counterparts in rural areas, these men were full of confidence and had no qualms in expressing their views. I suppose all the attention that the project got in the recent months had something to do with that.
To my question as to why the village did not do anything about the floodwater knocking at their doorsteps day in and day out for years, the response was: “It is a sin to be poor and insignificant in this country.” Surely with 800 plus votes in this village alone the collective efforts of the twelve villages could have persuaded the local politicians to help you people out, I asked them. A young lad in his early twenties was quick to respond, “You see they are not politicians, they are our lords and when you are a ‘house chicken’ no one cares how much it costs.”
For years the people of Kot Nizam lived under extreme conditions. Debt, despair, disease and above all low self-esteem they had it all before RDPI decided to take matters into their own hands and started working on an ambitious programme that has literally turned the tide for the people of this tiny hamlet.
These young men were laughed at when they came up with the proposal. They ran from pillar to post mustering support and much needed funds with little initial luck, but the important thing was that they never gave up. But as the adage goes, where there is will there is way.
RDPI surprised everyone by managing to pull off such a huge project without any governmental support. Today the same people who laughed at them are lining up at Kot Nizam to cash in on this success story. But the most important thing is that the people of Kot Nizam are no longer a miserable bunch of people they once were.
What you find in Kot Nizam today is a bunch of defiant and proud people who state that they are no longer the doormats of the local politicians and moneylenders.
“Never again shall we stand outside the tehsil offices waiting to be heard; we know how to get things done now and we will get them done the way we managed to get rid of disease, poverty and hunger,” said another youth.
“See the munji, around you sir; this is the sign of our independence. After this year’s harvest we will no longer wear the moneylenders yoke around our neck,” another proud voice claimed. All the village now requires is the government to carry out the process of ishtimal (a legal process by which the scattered pieces of land owned by a single landlord are clubbed together).
“If the ishtimal is carried out today then no one can stop progress in our village,” exclaimed Master Bashir. “And do not forget the lady teacher for the girls’ primary school,” added the lambardar-in-waiting.
I had no reason to doubt their collective claims; there were telltale signs of newfound prosperity. A newly painted brick house here, and a couple of freshly plastered mud house there, point to the village’s road to economic recovery. The traditional blobs of filth oozing out of the drains in a similar village elsewhere were nowhere to be seen. Kot Nizam has spotted the rainbow. All it has to do now is to find the gold pot.
Kot Nizam could very well hold the key to development for Pakistan’s rural outback 
