LAHORE: Fifty-year-old Zulfiqar takes a drag off his cigarette, exhaling thoughtfully. He is sitting on a rickety old charpoy right outside his tent house. A dog, his pet, sniffs at his shoes aimlessly, then trots off. To one side a couple of unwashed buffaloes idly chew cud. There are flies everywhere. The dirt and the trash strewn all around presents an extremely worrisome sight in the afternoon sunlight.

Zulfiqar is from a community of gypsy garbage pickers called “changars”. He lives in a vacant plot, converted into a makeshift tent slum by a few other families who have settled here since some years now, in Lahore’s Green Town area. The gypsies do not have much but they pay rent and electricity to the land’s owner. A TV set sitting in the middle of the trash-strewn, rundown environment is indeed an ironic sight.

As the country has begun to lock itself in, encouraging ‘social distancing’, and public health messages necessitate hygiene and hand washing to prevent being affected by coronavirus, in Zulfiqar’s world such things cannot exist so easily.

For one, there is a serious lack of running water where he has set up house. There was once a hand pump but now it is dry. They must travel a long way on foot, armed with plastic containers to collect drinking water from the government run filtration plant. That may work for drinking, but then not enough is left to wash up with. This is why they hardly have a bath, he admits.

“We have to go days without a bath because there is simply no water here,” he says. “We just save what we have for basic washing up.”

Gypsies are often discriminated against because of this lack of cleanliness, and are isolated from society – an automatic kind of social distancing – but this bad hygiene may spell trouble when it comes to prevention from the coronavirus where hand washing has been considered as the best way to steer clear of it.

But gypsies are not the only communities that are facing these issues. Water is a huge problem in the whole country, and according to a report by Water Aid, more than half of the total population of the country does not have access to clean water, and 40,000 children die each year because of this.

Yet low-income families bear the brunt of the situation.

Rukhsana, 40, a home-based worker who lives near Chungi Amar Sadhu, a factory area in Lahore, says that she must use groundwater to wash up with – even though this may be laced with chemicals.

In a neighbouring area, Samina says that her tap water is so dirty it is not fit to be used most times. “Whenever we turn on the taps, the water is black and dirty and we have to run it a while before it clears up,” she says.

Washing hands in such circumstances cannot always be expected.

Social worker Zahid has been working on awareness campaigns in several low-income areas and he attests to the same circumstances where water is concerned. “Many of the pipes are damaged and the sewage often mixes with the clean water,” he says.

Bilal Manzoor who is part of the Huqooq-e-Khalq Movement, a collective, focusing on rights of marginalised people, observes that the government has not taken many feasible initiatives to help communities in such places. Manzoor has worked with the low-income communities living in Gajjumata, Kahna, Chungi, etc. “Intermittent hand washing is easy to say in a message on TV,” he says. “But if one looks closely, a lot of people aren’t doing it because they don’t have enough clean water for it. Besides, there are lots more who should be made more aware by the government.”

It is not just lack of access to clean water that the coronavirus outbreak has made apparent. It is also the lack of social distancing that people can practice.

Despite the lockdown, those living in slums, settlements, and even in small rented places cannot do much of social distancing. In most cases, low-income families tend to be larger.

Zulfiqar himself has four children, while one of his neighbours has seven. In her one room cramped flat, Maryam Bibi lives with her five sons. All must sleep in the same room.

“In these circumstances, if even one person becomes a carrier of this virus, or is affected, the whole family health is compromised,” says Zahid. “These communities fall sick quite frequently, and many contract diseases like hepatitis, jaundice, and other infections. They will not be expected to realise they have corona, if there is a case. In fact there has been no testing from these areas because tests are expensive. These communities are highly vulnerable.”

Academic Ammar Ali Jan who is also an integral part of the Haqooq-e-Khalq Movement says that washing hands and distancing while being advocated as the most important preventive measures from corona, are huge issues to deal with. “There are around 6 people on average in one household in such areas,” he says. “The infrastructure of their living conditions is anti-poor, and anti-health. With corona hitting us, we are now faced with the question of spatial distribution.”

It fundamentally points to the central problem of where the power dynamic lies.

“We have land acquired by powerful groups, but who will pose that question when it comes to making affordable housing for the poor? Who will ask the question about water being polluted by toxic dumping by powerful factory owners? In the end more than law, it’s about the power dynamic.”

Naseem, 24, is aware enough to know about the virus, but she can see that many in her neighbourhood are not aware enough. A resident of Kotha Pind Bazaar, she says despite the lockdown, kids are still playing in the alleys, and no one seems to care or listen. “If even one person gets it, it will catch on like wildfire,” she says. “This is how people like us are facing it every day.”

Published in Dawn, March 29th, 2020