Bus stand lacks basic amenities

BOTH the bus and wagon stands are in a shambles. The general bus stand was established in 1979 over an area of about 15 acres. From here, about 800 buses and as many mini-wagons ply on different inter-city routes. Its maintenance is the responsibility of the tehsil administration, which is receiving hundreds of thousands of rupees annually from its income. According to bus and wagon owners, they have to pay the contractors fee for each round of their vehicles to other cities.

The two stands are without basic amenities, including waiting rooms, lavatories and sewerage. Passengers have to wait in the open, causing inconvenience particularly to the women and children.

According to Divisional Transport Federation president Sohail Ashraf, transporters annually pay taxes of about Rs6 million to the tehsil administration, which should make arrangements for the passengers. He said the passenger lounge had been occupied by the staff of the police post established there on the demand of the transporters to check suspects and anti-social elements.

Three is no arrangement for drinking water, and the passengers are forced to purchase soft drinks. The stands also lack proper lighting at night.

The encroachments and illegal constructions around the bus and wagon stands are another problem. The administration has several times removed the encroachers, but they again construct their illegal extensions. The tehsil administration should remove the encroachments to facilitate the flow of traffic.

The stands should also have the proper offices for all the buses and wagons. Moreover, there should be constructed bays for the buses of different routes.

THE water reservoir constructed about eight years ago in the three-marla housing scheme adjacent to the Islami Colony has not been commissioned for unknown reasons. Residents of these localities are facing difficulties in getting clean drinking water. They have demanded the tehsil Nazim to issue orders for the functioning of the water reservoir so that they could get potable water.

SAMMASATTA-Bahawalnagar is the most neglected railway section of the Pakistan Railways. The entire track is outdated, and only one passenger train (up and down) runs on this section in 24 hours.

Due to the old track and lack of proper maintenance, trains have derailed many times. During pre-partition days, it was an important section, which connected Karachi with the other stations of the sub-continent. Due to lack of interest by the railways, the transporters are minting money on this route.

The Pakistan Railways should replace the old track and introduce a fast train on this section. It will help to provide better travelling facility to the passengers of far-flung areas like Fort Abbas, Haroonabad, Bahawalnagar and other places. It will also be a source of income for the railway.

Beware, the ‘T’ word can land you in jail

WHEN travelling in the United States, be careful how you utter the “T” word. When a driver of a Greyhound bus service between Philadelphia and New York got fed up with his passengers telling him what to do to avoid the massive traffic buildup on a New Jersey highway, he goofed and told them: “We’re going to the Taliban, don’t worry about it.”

The remark led to several calls to police emergency number 911 by the cell phone passengers. Within minutes the New Jersey police squads had surrounded the bus and they promptly arrested the driver, Robert Mickens, 37, of Brooklyn.

According to the police the incident came to a head when several passengers questioned him about the route he was taking to New York.

Mickens encountered heavy holiday-weekend traffic, and sought a shortcut to Manhattan by leaving the highway and taking side roads to avoid traffic bottlenecks.

But the passengers questioned his decision and even complained.

“He openly lost his temper and made a comment he shouldn’t have made,” said a police officer. “The remark was specially inappropriate in today’s world.”

Although the incident came to an end quietly on Saturday night, the Greyhound bus service has suspended Mickens until investigations are completed.

On Monday Mickens’s mother came to his defence saying that her son was a joker and even when he knocks at his home door, he says: “Open the door; it’s the Taliban.”

She adds: “He means no harm by it. It’s just a joke. “

But the “T” word has landed Mickens in trouble and he is learning the hard way that in the American lexicon “Taliban” are no joke.

FOREEX LOSS: Pakistan expatriates, the country’s financial wizards have said, are a major source of foreign exchange, filling the coffers of the country’s reserves.

The expatriates who lost money when Nawaz Sharif’s government froze foreign exchange accounts in 1998, when US and other countries clamped sanctions on Pakistan when it exploded the bomb, lost confidence in the government and literally stopped sending precious foreign exchange. But now it seems they have a renewed sense of hope (hopefully not misplaced) that their money is safe now.

Money managers in Pakistan banks in the United States say that the dollar transfers, despite the conditions imposed by the US Federal reserve bank, have gone up. The money transfers during the Eid season and the marriage season that follows almost doubles or triples as people travel back home to be with their loved ones.

But the scarcity of air-carriers going to Pakistan has left many an expatriate without any means to get home which, of course, results in loss of foreign exchange for the country.

The reason is simple: the expatriate traffic has risen significantly in the last decade but there are fewer airlines which service Pakistan cities in the aftermath of the Afghan war and the perceived terrorist threats to international carriers in Pakistan.

Besides Eid celebrations, the end of Ramazan also marks the beginning of marriage season, and the Pakistanis who have made it big, and there are many now, travel to their homes with hordes of their family members.

Although their choice of carriers is still Pakistan Airlines which has direct flights which take only 16 hours to get to destinations in Pakistan (if there are no technical delays ), they find that there are no seats in the national carrier, so they switch to other airlines which take as long as 24 hours with two plane changes at least. Even these airlines do not have seats available to and from Pakistan until Jan 15 next.

PIA officials and travel agents here say that “for the Eid and marriage season seats to Pakistan are booked solid as far back as June of each year depending on the Ramazan schedule.”

But the question is, when there is a pattern of increased traffic to Pakistan during Eid holidays each year, why doesn’t some marketing genius in PIA take into account the burgeoning traffic and, like the Haj season when the airline manages to increase flights to Saudi Arabia, manoeuvre to increase the number of flights from North America?

Although PIA’s Managing Director Ahmed Saeed and Chief Operating officer Khurshid Anwer said, in interviews, that they aimed at making North America a centrepiece of their expansion due to heavy expatriate traffic, they say that their aircraft fleet is not enough to allow them to expand operations now.

Although the PIA heads have a point, one must say that at one point PIA had nine flights a week to New York as against five now. Those flights were usually packed in the 1990s, so if marketing managers were to note the trend they could have persuaded the management to make adjustments to increase airlines profits. Last week many people one met in the city, during many Iftar parties, complained that they had been trying to get seats to Pakistan for the last two months with no luck. Some were going to spend as much as $10,000 to $15,000 on visits taking their loved ones with them to attend marriages of their relatives.

Travel agents here say that one of the reasons many passengers do not get seats on PIA is the antiquated reservation system in the airline which still compels the New York Office to contact head office to release seats. They say the airline should consider upgrading the reservation system to maximize profits, but so far, with all the changes stipulated by the airline, no one seems to be thinking of small things like improving its reservations system, on the one hand, and meeting the demands of the burgeoning expatriates traffic by increasing number of flights to Pakistan, on the other hand.

For Pakistan its precious foreign exchange is being lost.

VISA SYSTEM: This is a report about the US visa system going haywire in the aftermath of the Sept 11 attacks impacting the lives of mostly innocent Muslim men between ages of 18 and 45 years.

Last July the US State Department revoked the entry visas of at least 100 Muslim men, many of whom were already in the US and many gainfully employed in American corporations.

The revocation of visas didn’t mean the men had to leave the country though. It just meant that if they did leave, they wouldn’t be able to get back in.

A report in the Wall Street Journal quotes US officials as saying that the letters went out, officials say, because security checks had come back from the FBI with “hits” on the men’s names.

But the problem was that by that time at least some of the men had already used the original visas and travelled to the US. The WSJ observed: “If they were too dangerous to let in, however, the men weren’t deemed dangerous enough to toss out.

Take for instance the case of a Pakistani, Naeem Ahmed, 26-year-old computer specialist at an investment bank in New York, who received his notification at his New York address. The bank also was notified, and fired him.

The bank then promised a review if Ahmed’s name is cleared, and has asked him not to publicize its name. But Ahmed wasn’t forced to leave the country.

“I would come home every day. I’d be afraid. Will there be someone waiting?” he says, adding: “And there never was.”

Without a job to justify his immigration status, Ahmed decided to re-apply for a visa to have his legitimacy in the US re-established, but he still stands in the queue.

The WSJ says that after graduating from Bowdoin College in Maine in 2000, Ahmed had gone straight to his New York job. He was among 5,000 Muslims randomly interviewed by the FBI after Sept 11. In March, he went to London for a visa extension. It came through after the routine six-week security clearance. For the next month, Ahmed networked with Bowdoin contacts, and a story about him later appeared in the New York Sun.

“I am hurt,” he e-mailed a friend. “Hurt that anyone could imagine that I was part of the atrocities we witnessed last year.”

After a futile search, Ahmed flew back to Lahore, the WSJ said. He searched his mind for clues that might explain some blot on his record. Was it a contribution he had made to a mosque? A flight simulator he designed freshman year? A Internet exchange with an anti-Muslim professor? Or simply his common name?

Or might it have been the speech he gave at the Bowdoin commencement? His theme was the danger of jumping to conclusions — of his temptation to stereotype Americans, and their temptation to stereotype him. “I hope, at the very least,” he told his classmates back then, “that I have been able to convince you that I am in fact not a terrorist.”

A spokesman for the Bureau of Consular Affairs told the Journal that the State Department mailed off letters to the men, mostly to their foreign addresses, telling them that their tickets of admission to the US — their visas — had been revoked. The letters cited a law barring entry to terrorists. It invited the men to stop by any US consulate to apply again.

Lawyers following the revocation cases say they tend to involve men between the ages of 18 and 45 from Muslim countries.

A whole lot of enfants terribles: Sindh Assembly session

PANDEMONIUM in the visitors’ and Press galleries and unruliness in the House overshadowed the oath-taking proceedings in Thursday’s inaugural session of the Sindh Assembly.

The assembly secretariat and its staff have only themselves to blame for all the rumpus and indiscipline in the galleries. They simply forgot the count of seats while obliging elected MNAs and MPAs and issuing passes to an umpteen number of people.

But all this started in the House itself. The hall echoed with full-throated “Jeay Bhutto” slogans as some uneducated degree-holder women MPAs entered the hall of the august House in a procession. As the PPP followers in one section of the visitors’ gallery joined the chorus, the fire-brand male and female youths of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement in another section of the visitors’ gallery went on matching the crescendo with the slogans of “Altaf, Altaf” and “Jeay Altaf”. It was enough to provoke the men in turban-and-cloak, who raised the slogans of Nara-i-Takbeer, trying unsuccessfully to match the street talent of the workers and MPAs of the PPP and the MQM.

Naveed Qamar, Khurshid Shah and Shaaban Meerani of the PPP and Safwanullah, Farooq Sattar and Nasreen Jalil of the MQM witnessed the proceedings from the Governor’s Gallery but did not bother to signal their followers in the visitors’ gallery to behave.

Outside the assembly building, the police had laid a massive security net, closing Court Road for all vehicular movement except those with passengers carrying the security passes for the assembly session.

Inside the building, all entrances and passages leading to the galleries were virtually taken over by swarms of visitors of all kinds and behaviour. This, coupled with the late arrival of members-elect, contributed to a late start of the session by an hour or so.

As soon as the presiding officer, Jalal Mehmud Shah, followed the ceremonial mace-bearer and settled down in his seat, some members belonging to the camps of the PPP and the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal stood up and tried to draw, in vain though, the attention of the chair. They, however, remained unnoticed and unheard amid a shouting match going on between PPP and MQM activists in the visitors’ galleries. These members-elect probably, following in the foot-steps of their counter-parts in the National Assembly, wanted the chair to clarify whether the oath being administered to them was under the 1973 Constitution or the controversial Legal Framework Order.

Proceedings in the unruly House were set in motion with a recitation from the Holy Quran and its translation in Urdu and Sindhi, followed by a Na’at recited by an amateur teenager.

Indifferent to the tumult in the galleries and inside the hall packed with the presence of 162 members, Jalal Shah asked the members to stand up to take the oath in Urdu. He repeated the performance by administering the oath in Sindhi and English as well. In between, again in vain, he warned the crowd in the galleries to keep quiet or he would order their removal.

Immediately after the oath was over, Nisar Khuhro of the PPP stood up to seek clarification that the oath administered to members was not under the LFO.

As Jalal Shah clarified that he had administered the oath in accordance with the 1973 Constitution, Shoaib Bokhari of the MQM tried to engage himself in a verbal brawl with Nisar Khuhro over the issue.

The young but unimpressive man from Ghotki, nominated by the PML(Q) for the top provincial slot, was the focus of attention. Inside the house, receiving congratulations and in the galleries a topic of discussion with reference to his academic credentials already under scrutiny in a court. He went unclapped for when he came to sign the roll of members.

However, the real entertainment came because of the presence of Arbab Ghulam Rahim. Whenever he stood up to meet another member and went to sign the roll, the galleries echoed with caw, caw — an obvious reference to Pir Pagar’s wit about him.

TAILPIECE: All MPAs of the People’s Party had been bussed in from Bilawal House together. Divided, they feared, they would have been whisked away for the creation of a forward bloc in Sindh also, said a senior PPP leader. — Abu Ayesha