LAHORE: After decades of neglect, a little relief seems to be coming for the residents of Asif Town. The rundown area, surrounded by factories and fields where cattle feed is grown, has been suffering from a lack of civic amenities, and the government – local or provincial – has rarely turned to see what is needed.

Asif Town is riddled with issues revolving around sanitation, provision of basic utilities, social problems, and of course health issues, but residents say that hardly any government official or public representative ever visited them, except for electioneering.

Many have never protested against this.

Basheeran, a midwife, who has been living in the area since the 1980s, says that poverty ends up silencing the best of people.

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” she says. “And so we have always accepted the least. We are just thankful for the roof over our heads.”

Most of the issues are stemming from the sewerage problem. Open gutters and drains, old and broken sewage lines are a common sight in the slum which attract mosquitoes and flies among several other insects which end up harming the health of many especially the children.

“I see children falling sick here all the time,” says Basheeran. “I deal with a lot of pregnant women, and many of them contract illnesses like malaria.”

Waterborne diseases refuse to go away from the area all year round, residents say.

“My four children and I often fall ill, sometimes with stomach problems, sometimes with cold and cough,” says Shaheen.

“Often our income is spent on traveling to and from hospitals and on medication.”

The fact that there are no health centres or basic health units and dispensaries makes the situation worse. The only nearby hospitals are either in Kahna or General Hospital which is further up Ferozepur Road.

The diseases break out because of the toxic dumping by factories while residents also dump their own dirty water in fields. Because there is no system through which ‘gray water’ is drained out from homes, most people fill their buckets with this used kitchen and bathroom water and drain these out in the fields, where this water flows down a main drain, which eventually ends up in the Rohi drain. Some residents have collected money to install a drain themselves.

“The government never put in place a good sewerage system and some years ago we all put in Rs1,500 per house and we had an ad hoc pipeline which took the dirty water outside to the fields,” says Pastor Saleem Masih.

The village lives on tap water. “There is no government water supply so some of us have ‘donkey pumps’ to pump out groundwater for ourselves,” he says.

Needless to say the groundwater levels have also been lowering, and every couple of years they have to upgrade the system for further extraction.

Since March though, residents have noticed that some work is being done by the government. The very first change for them came after a filtration plant was set up a month ago.

“Now the water we drink tastes and smells much better,” says resident Farzana.

The roads are being paved too. Only a few weeks ago, the main road leading into the locality was uneven and cracked.

“This is nothing, we have so much more work planned,” says Rana Mubasher Iqbal, the husband of MNA Shazia Mubashir, who often speaks on her behalf. Shazia won the seat in the 2013 elections.

“Work worth millions of rupees is being lined up not just for Asif Town but also for other parts of this constituency (NA-129).”

Other localities include Kahna, Dullum, and Gajju Matta – in total about 610 localities.

There are always detractors who are not ready to buy the MNA’s husband’s claims.

“They are doing this so that they can come next year for begging votes,” says Karamat Masih. “Otherwise we never existed for them.”

But Mr Iqbal stresses that it was the previous government representative of the constituency who was not interested in doing any work, and that everyone should not be painted with the same brush. “Water, gas, electricity, roads, all these issues will hopefully be completely resolved soon,” he says. “We have some land left for graveyards, and we hope to allot some land for the minority community too.”

Christian residents have complained that they have no graveyard land, that sometimes they bury new bodies in the same grave as old ones. Many parts of Asif Town are dominated by Christians who complain of lack of political representation.

“Minority candidates are chosen by their parties so they have little connection with the grassroots once they win,” says Pastor Javed Bhatti. He and his brother Mukhtar are senior PML-N workers in the local union council but do not turn a blind eye to their own problems.

“Minorities’ issues are rarely given importance by ruling governments,” he says. “We have serious drug infestation in our community here, including the manufacturing and selling of moonshine; young kids can buy hashish for as low Rs70. But there is no place they can play sports in or any good schools in the area.”

Mr Bhatti says they are relieved of the work finally being done but the government still has a long way to go if it wants to resolves all their issues. Unfortunately, he adds, being from the minority community, they cannot always voice themselves.

Published in Dawn, June 19th, 2017