100 days of district governments: achievements & challenges
THE present, evolved and devolved system of district governments, will complete 100 days on Nov 22. The Musharraf government had many expectations from this system as it is designed to inculcate the perception of democracy in the society in its true spirit, with the emphasis on providing equitable justice and delivering services at the doorsteps of the people. It was envisaged to be a system where people would own development projects and through their chosen representatives would monitor the performance of administration.
Below is the story of Aurangzeb Khan, peasant/ worker councillor of Union Council Dagai, Swabi (NWFP), which is a miniature of achievements and success/failure of the new district government system. If magnified, it can give a comprehensive national picture of the challenges faced and expectations based on this system.
Aurangzeb is a matriculate and was a farmer and also doing some small business before he was elected a councillor. He says that the reason for contesting local government elections was purely based on local ghami/shadi relationships. He decided to contest election for the peasants seat, as, he thinks a farmer is the person who has a number of problems. Nobody is there to guide a farmer or apprise him of community participation benefits in agriculture projects. For the last three years, tobacco companies have looted the growers with farmers’ money still unpaid.
Aurangzeb says he had a lot of expectations from the government. We were expecting an authority to spend money. On the other hand the common man expects the councillors to perform miracles and change their destinies overnight. However, like Aurangzeb many pragmatic councillors understand government’s problems in these trying times. The councillor believes that everything is possible provided there is a will to do things. Community cooperation is necessary as it takes two to make a quarrel.
The present local government elections were contested on non- party basis. Aurangzeb belongs to none of the political party. However, he feels that there is a hidden party affiliation and partisanship within the union council now. This negates the basic idea of holding these elections on non-party basis.
ACHIEVEMENTS: Swabi is known for tobacco crop and is the main source of income for the farmers. Farmers owe a lot of money to various tobacco companies. Such companies have defaulted on framer’s money for the last three years. The peasant councillors have now tackled the issue diligently. Aurangzeb says that it was quite simple. Peasant/workers councillors of the area talked to District Nazim, who in turn communicated their concerns to Pakistan Tobacco Board’s chairman. Corps Commander of Peshawar and even Chief Executive got to know our concerns regarding sale of tobacco within no time. The issue is now resolved and farmers have sold all their stock to those multi-national companies such as Pakistan Tobacco Company, Lakson Tobacco etc who are reputed for making their payments on time. In this manner, the councillors’ initiative has saved poor farmers to be at the mercy of defaulted local tobacco companies.
Irrigation department wanted to repair water channels. However, the cost was supposed to be shared by the community whose land was irrigated through these channels. The task was entrusted to peasant councillors and Nazim/Deputy Nazim of the union council. Aurangzeb says that they have been able to mobilize the community. Irrigation department has surveyed the area and has given us estimates of expenditure. The land delimitation disputes among farmers have been solved through our intervention. We have now opened bank account and contribution from the community into this project is in progress. Without local councillors, i.e., people from within the community, the process of community mobilization would have been very difficult, if not impossible.
Councillors were asked to update the lists of the poor, widows and orphans who deserve Zakat. Aurangzeb says that we did it by making sure that all those who deserve were there. People now need not chase gazetted officers for attestation of their national identity cards and domiciles, as councillors are accessible 24 hours to them in their neighbourhood.
Similarly, Aurangzeb is pursuing the issue of getting a telephone connection for his village. He makes frequent visits to schools of the area and wishes to be on the citizen community board for agriculture and education/literacy, which are in the process of being established.
Most of the councillors got training on the basics of local government system. They now need to improve their skills through further training so that they can perform even better and their performance becomes precedent for the future batch of councillors. The cooperation of administration in the execution of development projects at the grassroots level will be a motivating force for many councillors to work, otherwise, the present district government system will prove an exercise in futility like the previous schemes. If the councillors can help solve farmers’ problems to bring agricultural revolution, if they can help identifying development projects to eradicate poverty, if they can mobilize community to share burden with government, then why not the government can have an exponential increase in development expenditure in order to get Pakistan out of present situation and put in on the way of modernity as dreamed by the founders.
Controversy over crop size
AS cotton picking begins across the country, forecasts about the crop size also start pouring in from different quarters.
Everyone tries to give the forecast a twist favourable to achieve its own ends. Therefore, cotton season has always been rife with contradictory crop size claims, creating uncertainty till the picking is over.
To solve this problem, the federal ministry for food, agriculture and livestock constituted the Standing Committee on the Cotton Crop Assessment (SCCCA) sometime back. But, the committee has lost the confidence of the farming community in its estimates of the crop size which the SCCCA releases fortnightly during the picking season.
Recently, all the five SCCCA members from the farming community resigned in protest that their suggestions had not been considered in the committee meetings. Later, they had to withdraw their resignations on the request of federal agriculture minister Khair Muhammad Junejo.
Relations between SCCCA chairman Chaudhry Shafi Niaz and the growers’ representatives turned sour when the former put the crop size at 10.9 million bales and the latter at 10.4 million bales for the year 2001-2002.
Growers say forecasts on higher side depress cotton prices in the local market artificially when the commodity is still in their hands.
Virtually, at the end of season, the SCCCA projections always stay on higher side which the committee pundits cover up with the ‘myth’ of either non-mill consumption on the basis of ex-farm production or some bales go unaccounted to evade sales tax.
The apex forum on agriculture-related issues is the Federal Committee on Agriculture (FCA) as federal finance, commerce and agriculture ministers and secretaries are its members apart from the representatives of all the four provinces.
The FCA in its meeting had taken up the matter of cotton crop size and put it at 10.5 million bales. It was the time when the Pakistan Cotton Ginners Association (PCGA) had released its cotton arrival figures at 1.71 million bales up to Oct 15 last at ginneries across the country. It was 25 per cent less than the corresponding period last year when 2.26 million bales had recorded at ginneries.
Cotton arrival again showed a decline of 16 per cent as per the PCGA figures of Nov 1 last when 3.2 million bales reached ginneries as compared to 3.8 million bales for the same period last year. But, the SCCCA pundits in their recent meeting neither took into account the FCA estimate nor the cotton arrival pattern at ginneries this year and put the crop size at 10.6 million bales.
This has confused cotton market analysts that why the SCCCA always projects optimistic figures on the crop size when all quarters besides market indicators are other way round.
Farming community leaders have now started questioning the SCCCA terms of reference and its method of assessing the crop size. They say there are only two parties in the cotton market — sellers and buyers.
Growers as the producers represent sellers while ginners, spinners, exporters and the public sector purchaser represent the buyers. Therefore, the SCCCA should have equal number of representatives, argue the growers’ representatives.
THOUGH the NGOs are not as much at the centre of attraction as they were in the early days of the Musharraf regime, they have still a strong representation at the centre in the form of Federal Local Bodies Minister Umer Asghar Khan.
He was recently in the city to address a seminar ‘Country’s present political and economic situation and calls of new politics’ organized by the Civil Liberty Council, Multan.
All the speakers, including Mr Khan, took the political parties to task and accused their leadership of committing malpractices and corruption and stressed for a ‘new political culture’.
Defending the political parties, PPP’s central council member Haider Abbas Gardezi questioned the phrase ‘new politics’ saying: “politics has always been a pursuit to bring various segments of society to an agreement to live together in harmony in a just system.”
He said it had become a fashion to blame politicians for all ills prevalent in the country. It seemed nobody had the perception to go through the details who had how much share in the sorry state of affairs among politicians, army, civil bureaucracy and the judiciary.
Mr Khan met a number of area politicians having clout of the leftist politics and shared with them his plan to launch a political party after resigning from the government office. He was pinning hopes with the cadre of NGOs and some ‘untested’ leaders of small political parties of his father’s Pakistan National Conference.
Recounting the story of Urdu short story
THE erudite speaker and educationist, with a doctorate in intellectual history, Arifa Syeda Zehra, was in the Model Town Library auditorium last week as a guest of the Lahore Arts Forum to speak on the Urdu short story.
To start with, Dr Zehra traced the history of the short story and recounted the salient features of each phase in its development. She pointed out that before stories were reduced to writing, they used to be narrated orally. Even religious books carry stories to advance a point. In the earlier days, she said, animals were used as symbols to weave a story around. In Sanskrit stories, however, all bad things were attributed to women. Bagh-o-Bahar is more about pain than about pleasure. All the same, one should not close one’s eyes to reality and, as such, stories of every era can be considered to be the social history of the time.
Comparing Munshi Prem Chand with Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, she said that while Prem Chand mourned the desolation of fields in the rural areas, Qasmi depicted their freshness and greenery. Talking about Ashfaq Ahmad, Bano Qudsia and Qudratullah Shahab, she said that they had a lot of talent but, unfortunately, they had allowed their capabilities to compromise with the times. In the end, she regretted that no worthwhile story was being written today.
Since Dr Arifa had said something in praise of Balwant Singh, someone in the audience asked her what did she think of the violence advocated by him in his most popular story, Jagga. She gave a very apt answer. She said that one should not forget that Balwant Singh was a Sikh and violence was a part of his life. However, he had not advocate violence as such but only as a means for an honourable end.
She was also asked to comment on the statement of an eminent literary figure from India who had said that there were only three good short story writers in Pakistan — Intezar Husain, Khalida Husain and Enver Sajjad. The questioner said that while one could read and understand Intezar Husain, and, to some extent, Khalida Husain, Enver Sajjad was totally unreadable. After some slight hesitation, Dr Arifa agreed with him.
IN passing, I may add that LEAF held its monthly readings session this week, the last in the Alhamra Cultural Complex before Ramazan. It was not trilingual, as usual, as there was no one to fill the slot allotted to Punjabi. Jocelyn Ortt-Saeed was there after a long sojourn back home in Australia, and read her poem. Salman Shahid was also there to read his poems in English as also to handle the arts capsule. Naturally, he spoke about what goes into preparing what we see on the silver and the mini-screen. In the end, Amjad Islam Amjad presented his poetry.
THE monthly sitting of Adab Serai was held this week. The senior poet, Abdul Ali Shaukat, is now almost a regular at these sessions but it was surprising to see Mashkur Husain Yaad perched there on a sofa radiating his typically mischievous smiles.
The programme started with Shahnaz Muzzammil reviewing some published books. She first took up Prof Attiya Syed’s collection of short stories, Hikayaat-i-Junoon. It was stunning, she said. Going through it one felt that the writer had all along been a tourist looking at places of worship, religious structures, museums and restaurants of different countries. Each story in the book is different, from the other and some of them give glimpses of Pakistani culture. I felt that Attiya had now made a place for herself among the top short story writers of the country.
Shahnaz Muzzammil also spoke about Dr Qamar Ara’s latest collection of poetry, Shagan. She said that Qamar Ara already had published collections of Urdu poetry which included the ghazal, the nazm and the geet, but this was her first attempt in Punjabi. Her poetry, she said, had a distinct sufistic touch.
The other book commented upon was the maiden collection of a newcomer in the filed, Roohi Naaz. Titled, Tum Say Milnay Kay Ba’ad, it carries her free verse together with a few nazms and ghazals. Shahnaz Muzzammil was appreciative of her nazms but felt that her ghazals were somewhat wanting.
The book reviews were followed by the usual round of poetic recitals in which the usual crowd took part. However, I must quote some verses of Mashkur Husain Yaad:
Dil ko seenay mein safeenay ki tarah rakhtay hein
Aik toofan ko nageenay ki tarah rakhtay hein
Milnay walay hamein kia kuchh nahin day kar jatay
Har mulaqat khazinay ki tarah rakhtay hein
EARLIER, to coincide with the birth anniversary of Allama Iqbal, the Lahore chapter of the Pakistan Academy of Letters arranged a talk by Dr Agha Yameen. I understand similar lectures were arranged on the occasion in other cities where the Academy has an office.
It was a largely attended function with Prof Mashkur Husain Yaad in the chair. Incidentally, he has recently let go of Ghalib and started concentrating on Iqbal to come up with the quick conclusion that “he is the greatest people’s poet of the 20th century. “The main topic which Dr Yameen picked up was Iqbal’s concept of khudi, or the potential of human ego. He said that it was a cardinal principle of Iqbal’s philosophy. The concept of taqdeer or destiny was erroneous, he added, as man was the ultimate moulder of his destiny. However, this khudi or ego should not remain within the confines of individualism but should transcend into a collective national ego.