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March 30, 2006
A bureaucratic casualty
The ill-fated women’s library project has been scrapped and replaced with a trauma centre project, writes Musfira Jamal
The city women’s library complex project was initiated by about twenty elected women city councillors of the previous City Government under Nazim Naimatullah Khan. These city councillors pooled their development funds and launched the Rs65 million project. The complex was being built on the land earmarked for a city library in 1991.
Despite all the efforts, the city library project is in doldrums. According to Moinuddin Khan, a member of the committee which drew up the design for the library, an old student of Karachi University had pledged Rs300 million for this institution. It will now lapse and the city will be denied this golden opportunity to raise a human resource development centre which would have benefited thousands of students studying in major institutions of the city around this library.
The plot had remained vacant for 13 years and was not grabbed by land mafia or some developer to build a commercial plaza. The previous city nazim handed over this plot of land to the women councillors for their library project. As per law an amenity plot set aside for a special purpose cannot be converted for some other purpose.
Keeping this legal point in mind and also to optimize the use of development funds at their disposal, herculean efforts were made to get the multipurpose library complex rolling which would benefit women in a number of ways.
The complex was supposed to have a three-storey general library with a quality research centre. It was also planned to provide facilities for a technologically advanced vocational and display centre for locally made items of international standards, an ICT centre, legal aid and counselling, career guidance, adult education and health centres and a day-care centre for working mothers as well as a women’s hostel. All these facilities along with two auditoriums, two lecture halls and a gymnasium could have generated valuable income to carry on the affairs of this institution.
It would have provided easy access to women from all parts of the city, as well as from the major educational institutions in the city. Women from other cities could have availed this facility as well, staying in the premises hostel.
Libraries all over the world are going through huge transformations. New information formats like e-journals, data files and media clips are now essential. These developments in information technology provide good research materials. These facilities are not easily available in our country.
The library project’s aim was an investment in the knowledge economy for women. We have to prepare our womenfolk who need more advanced skills and information to be able to function productively and dynamically in meaningful activities. In Pakistan literacy level of women is very low. Access to higher education and research is not that easy for young women. Conducive environment available for healthy and purposeful educational activities are also lacking.
The news that this library project would be converted into a trauma centre has come as a blow and has shattered the dreams and efforts of those associated with this project. There is a huge difference between a library and a trauma centre although both are important for the welfare of the citizens of this metropolis.
Converting the structure from a library complex to a trauma centre would require a lot of demolitions and alterations, which translates into huge wastage of resources. With good hospitals in the vicinity there is no dire need to erect another structure in the name of a trauma centre. There are other open spaces in and around Karachi to build such a facility.
It is astonishing to observe that no objections have been raised by any quarters of the society and no questions have been asked about the feasibility of this illegal conversion. Where are the exponents of women’s rights?
Demise of the library project is actually a blow given to the representative 33 per cent women of the city. These women stand powerless, helpless, and demoralised.
These forward-looking, visionary women have lost faith in the empty political slogans for women’s political, economic and social empowerment and of claims of raising the status of women. n
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