DATELINE ISLAMABAD: Still waiting for our first greenfield airport

DESPITE recent renovation, the existing Islamabad International Airport is literally bursting at the seams - with chaos and confusion. Compounding the capacity problem at the capital’s airport are two traits common in public services in the country — indiscipline and inefficiency.

The airport can hardly handle more than one international flight at a time — from the check-in counter at the departure hall, immigration, conveyor belt system, customs, arrival hall to the car park. If mayhem describes the typical scene inside the arrival or departure halls, it is sheer bedlam outside, including the car park.

Service at the check-in counters in the departure hall is torturously slow, and that at the immigration counters in the arrival hall is painfully slow. And baggage claim is total confusion with people pushing and baggage falling off and jamming the conveyor belts. (There are four conveyor belts, but one conveyor belt at this airport is hardly sufficient for a full international flight).

Outside, especially outside the international arrival hall, it is a fish market filled with scores of waiting relatives and taxi drivers, practically spilling onto the road. The car park is choked with parked and moving cars, as well as human and baggage trolley traffic.

The experience at Islamabad Airport has been described as a total nightmare not much different from that at the chaotic bus station at Faizabad. There cannot be a more embarrassing airport for a capital city than the existing Islamabad International Airport.

The plan to build a new Islamabad Airport at Pind Ranjha near Tarnol-Fatehjang Road began some 20 years ago in the 1980s when the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) started the process of land acquisition for the project. However, it was not until July 2003 that a serious move was reportedly undertaken to go ahead with the project.

It took another 16 months for the federal Cabinet to finally approve the new airport construction project in November 2004, and then another 14 months before CAA eventually signed an agreement in January 2006 with an American consultant, in association with a local consulting firm, to undertake project management services.

In May 2006, CAA invited pre-qualification bids for the new Islamabad airport, open to all international construction companies which have undertaken similar kind of work in their own country, with the requirement of participation by domestic construction companies. It is reported that the contract for construction would be awarded by January 2007.

Earlier this month, it was announced (for the umpteenth time in the past three years!) that the groundbreaking ceremony for the new Islamabad Airport will take place ‘soon’ ‘next month’.

Even if the foundation stone laying ceremony does eventually take place next month, it would probably not be until at least 2010 when the new airport will be operational.

Not surprisingly, the result of this long delay in constructing the new airport has been that the poor infrastructure at the existing military air base-converted- civilian airport has failed to keep up with demand.

The new Islamabad Airport is being billed as the first greenfield airport in the country. Greenfield means a new airport which is built from scratch in a new location because the existing airport is unable to meet the projected requirements of traffic. (The word greenfield originates from software engineering, meaning a project which lacks any constraints imposed by prior work. Those projects which are modified or upgraded from existing facilities are called brownfield projects.)

The name Gandhara International Airport has apparently been proposed for the new airport, a name that will go down well with Buddhist tourists from the Far East, constituting one of the biggest group of foreign visitors to this area.

Just like the upcoming Centaurus seven-star hotel complex, the new $300 million Islamabad Airport is supposed to be another landmark structure, symbolic of the Pakistani capital in the 21st century, complete with a state-of-the-art passenger terminal building, etc., and all the necessary infrastructure and ancillary services like connecting road and rail network into the capital city.

We could perhaps learn a lesson or two from India’s greenfield airport projects. Part of India’s ambitious nationwide airports modernization programme includes the construction of a string of greenfield airports. The first was built in Kochi in Kerala state in 1999; two are under construction at Bangalore and Hyderabad; and at least seven more are in the pipeline.

There are two features that we might want to take a closer look at. One is the low cost terminal for the increasingly popular low budget airlines. These no-frills carriers do not need aerobridges or complicated baggage handling systems.

The second feature is the ‘airport village’ designed for people to meet and greet. Such an airport village with eating and shopping stalls will do well here since it is the usual custom for friends and relatives of the passengers to spend some two to three hours waiting and milling around in airports.

But until such time as our first greenfield airport can come up in Pind Ranjha (which will be a good three to four years if we look on the bright side), CAA will need to address the immediate exigencies of the situation at the existing Islamabad Airport.

While nothing much can probably be done about augmenting capacity in the existing airport, CAA can at least improve on discipline and efficiency within and outside the arrival and departure halls, and in the car parking area.

To achieve this, we need better administrative management at the airport as well as greater education of passengers, visitors and the taxi drivers.

DATELINE NEW DELHI: Fables of a ruinous tradition

LAST week’s revelations about a US threat to bomb Pakistan “back to stone age” prompted this rework of an old fable. There was a monkey, which could be the leader of any of the two South Asian countries, India or Pakistan. And there was a scorpion, which could be any president of the United States. Once the neighbouring Taliban river was in flood. The monkey was able to cross it with ease, but not so the scorpion.

One day the scorpion begged the monkey for a ride. The unsuspecting simian promptly invited the helpless creature to hold on to his back for the journey across the Taliban river. They looked snug together as the monkey swam effortlessly. But half way through the roaring river the scorpion stung the monkey. Before succumbing to the poison, the monkey turned his head to look at the scorpion with disbelief. “I was trying to help you but now we are both going to die. Why did you do this?” the monkey asked with a hint of bewilderment. The scorpion mustered a sheepish grin and said demurely: “To help those who seek your friendship is your nature; to sting just anyone and ever so pointlessly is my habit.”

Just why the reworked fable involves India would not be easy to discern for many of today’s TV presenters who were either not born or were too young to remember the day the United States dispatched its Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal in 1971. The intention was clear and spine-chilling. The Seventh Fleet was India’s first brush with an implied threat of nuclear assault. The man who issued the threat during the unfortunate India-Pakistan conflict was President Nixon himself. What happened with Nixon eventually would give a new peep into his essentially criminal streak, not only with distant and small countries but also with trusting and guileless fellow Americans.

The man quoted by President Musharraf in his book “In the Line of Fire” as threatening Pakistan with bombardment so intense that it would put the country into the stone age is former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage. He has a similar history of gross indiscretions at home. Armitage only this year grudgingly acknowledged that he was the original source in the leak of former CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity. The Plame case led to an investigation into leaks of her identity that Bush administration critics said were to punish Plame’s former diplomat husband for his criticism of how pre-Iraq war intelligence was used. It is curious that President Bush didn’t know of Armitage’s involvement in the Plame leak. Now he says he didn’t know of Armitage’s threat to bomb Pakistan into the dark ages. Curious.

President Musharraf says in his yet to be released book that he decided to join the American hunt for the Taliban and Al Qaeda after “war gaming” a scenario with the United States. His conclusion was that if he didn’t join the war on terror, the United States would destroy Pakistan. Was he echoing the threat issued by the bodybuilder bullnecked Armitage? Is there a war game theory that imbues Venezuela’s Chavez, Cuba’s Castro, Iran’s Khomeini, Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh and now Lebanon’s Nasrallah with some kind of special powers that they were able to resist a bullying superpower and which do not obtain in Pakistan? All told it is not a very flattering conclusion to draw for the self-respecting people of Pakistan.

Likewise with India. Here is a country with a chronic fondness for foreign conquerors. From the time of Alexander the Great, or even before, to the current George Bush era, the story has been the same. Mao Tse-Tung had a name for the ever present class of people who traditionally and historically colluded with foreign powers to the detriment of their own people. He called them comprador. In mediaeval history, Jaichand betrayed his cousin Prithviraj against Muhammad Ghori; during the early days of still nascent British rule Mir Jaffer betrayed the Bengal ruler Sirajuddaullah by switching loyalty to Robert Clive.

Similarly, there is a class of Indians and Pakistanis who feel happy, even content when their governments find reasons to collude with say the FBI to hunt their own. The FBI now has a fully-fledged office in Delhi and probably a much bigger one in Islamabad. The same comprador folks however go into a sulk if cooperation is put on the anvil between the two countries that really and truly most urgently need to get their intelligence heads together -– India and Pakistan. Worse, with a robust media that clones the daily perspectives doled out from the “mother country”, and with a growing number of their zealous followers in the recipient countries there is very little space left to argue against the overpowering trend.

George Perkovich, author of the incisive and comprehensive account of “India’s Nuclear Bomb”, sees a traditional desire in India to move on from the client-donor relationship Delhi has had with the United States to one of equal partnership. Since Morarji Desai’s time at least, the country has striven to move on from the days of food assistance it received from the United States under the PL480 dole and from the days when it reciprocated with sherpas who would plant nuclear-powered gadgets on the rugged peaks of Nanda Devi for the United States to spy on China. It also wants to move on from the days when the controversial U2 American spy planes would take off from southern Indian bases to keep an eye on China but would occasionally veer into the Soviet airspace with at least one disastrous consequence, towards parity in their relationship.

It would be a laudable idea, but the ground reality looks unyielding if forbidding. News is coming in as we write of how an offer of plum portfolios in US multinational companies like Microsoft was all it took for two senior staffers of India’s National Security Council Secretariat to leak top secret documents to American diplomat Rosanne Minchew.

Classified documents seized from the accused, include India’s Nuclear Doctrine draft report, the foreign policy on the Thai KAR Canal and futuristic NSCS plans for data-sharing network among security agencies, Delhi police are being quoted as saying.

In the faraway Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, Indian soldiers are carrying out a demonstration for their American counterparts. As some 140 Indian soldiers descend on a mock village in the Oahu mountains to hunt for insurgents, they are watched by US Army officers looking for lessons they can apply when leading their units through the same exercise.

The troops are on the island for the biggest joint drills the Indian and US armies have had to date, the latest sign of growing military relations between the two nuclear powers. A wire agency report says the bilateral exercise, called Yudh Abhyas, or “training for war” in Hindi, started four years ago with a handful of Indian and US soldiers. It has since ballooned to feature hundreds of troops, including 140 Indians who flew to Hawaii, which hosts the US Pacific Command whose reach extends to their homeland.

Ageing Indian thespian Dilip Kumar once used a simple folksy couplet to illustrate the complexities of Mao Tse-Tung’s comprador class. “Kulhadi mein lakdi ka dasta na hota, to lakdi ke katne ka rasta na hota,” he told millions of his followers. (The axe has its handle made of wood; for the trees it’s a betrayal, and not very good.)

Initially, when Mr Qamar Zaman, Pakistan’s additional secretary at the Interior Ministry, surfaced in Delhi last week, there was a flurry of whispers that he had come to kick start the proposed mechanism for a bilateral anti-terror mechanism with India. However, it turned out that Mr Zaman was here to promote the idea of greater respect for those Saarc citizens who have been cleared to get an open travel permit to the member states. These now include officially accredited journalists and of course chief justices, MPs and other categories. Some countries, it seems, are still not complying with the decisions in this regard taken at the last summit in Dhaka. So Mr Zaman was visiting along with counterparts from other Saarc states to resolve the confusion.

jawednaqvi@rediffmail.com

The spirit of philanthropy

A woman rang up from the Defence Housing Authority last week to say how she was impressed by the philanthropic spirit of people in the United States and even in Kenya during her recent visit to certain countries. “Sitting on a wooden bench in a San Francisco park meant for the blind,” she said, “I noticed that the benches had on their backs the names of their donors.”

Identifying herself as Mrs Khan, she said the American government, the sole superpower, could afford to install such inexpensive fixtures in parks but apparently it was encouraging community members to contribute their bit to public welfare.

She also said that in Kenya, a country poorer than Pakistan, she observed that the government schools were very well maintained. The public there donated benches and desks and books to schools. Those who could not do something better, offered biscuits and milk packets to pupils.

“Why don’t well-off people here do such acts of charity?” she said. She urged her countrymen not to look to the government to do each and every thing for us.

Well, there is always need to “do more”, but private institutions and individuals here, too, are doing a lot of welfare work. Government intervention, though, is necessary to spur their worthy activities.

There are many welfare organizations which run successfully only because philanthropists have come to trust them. The Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation has been treating people with renal problems free of cost for more than 35 years, beginning with an eight-bed ward in the Civil Hospital in 1971. There is the eye hospital at Korangi 2-1/2 which is excellently run by the Layton-Rahmatullah Benevolent Trust. It not only treats people free but also provides food to the admitted patients. Imran Khan’s Shaukat Khanum Cancer Hospital, which also has a branch in Karachi, provides hundreds of people with free treatment. Even otherwise the expensive Aga Khan Hospital has provision for the poor. Karavan-i-Hayat, a hospital for mental patients in the Keamari area, also treats deserving patients free.

In fact, there are numerous welfare organizations and the foremost of them is the Edhi Foundation which receives assistance not only in Pakistan but also from many foreign countries. It has established its outlets in many countries and is serving humanity at large in its hour of suffering. Whenever there is a disaster in any part of the country, Edhi is there to help the people in distress. As we have seen recently on TV channels and read in newspapers, Edhi even reached Lebanon where there was a human crisis after the savage attacks by the Israel army.

Edhi has shelter homes for the destitute and orphans and also runs health facilities. Probably its most important service is its large fleet of ambulances, always ready to ferry the injured and the ailing to hospitals and their homes. The Chhipa ambulance service has also gained prominence in the city during recent years. Another well-known charity organization in Karachi is the Alamgir Welfare Trust. And there are political parties’ welfare wings such the Muttahida Qaumi Movement’s Khidmat-i-Khalq Committee and the Jamaat-i-Islami’s Al-Khidmat. The list of such charities is endless indeed.

In Pakistan most deeds are driven by religion. Shrines of sufi saints, such as Data Darbar in Lahore and Ghazi Abdullah Shah’s in Karachi, offer free food to the destitute. In the form of setting up of sabeels and giving away of free food, clothes and money, charity and philanthropic activities grow manifold during the months of Muharram, Rabiul Awwal, Shaaban and particularly Ramazan.

With the advent of Ramazan, charity organizations have begun their campaigns to seek donations for their year-long free operations. People here are generous at every level. If it were not so, there would not have been an increasing growth of beggars swarming every nook and cranny of the city, which may be reflecting negatively on society. People need an awareness of which organizations really serve worthy causes and therefore deserve to be helped. Every donor, however, may have his preference.

Back to Mrs Khan’s proposal. Innovative ideas always appeal. In the past there have been campaigns such as 'adopt a school’ and 'adopt a park’. They took off successfully but went missing somewhere midair. If they had been sustained, they could have produced tangible results. There are so many schools and parks that need to be adopted and may be named after their 'adopters’.

There are semi-developed areas ruined by the recent rains and enduring neglect of the relevant civic agencies. Individuals can help improve the quality of life in these localities. There are stretches of roads that may be carpeted. Yes, we should not look to the government for each piece of work to be done. Let people, particularly philanthropists, come forward and help the public. And why not encourage firms seeking publicity through welfare projects? Let there be roundabouts and parks identified with their names if they maintain them and keep investing in their upkeep.

Load-shedding of another kind

Karachi is once again is in the grip of load-shedding and prolonged blackouts. Streets drenched in darkness echo with the hum of generators. It was on one such street in Defence recently that a motorist stopped his car to buy corn on the cob from a roadside vendor. The sun was going down fast as the street lights, which had only just been lit, went out. This was right before the customer took out his wallet to pay the man for the corn. Quickly the motorist paid the man what he thought was Rs20 and left for home while munching on the delicious snack.

It was only after he had reached home that evening that he realised he had actually paid the bhuttay wallah Rs5,000 instead of Rs20. He left home once again to rectify his mistake but even after driving around in the streets for two hours, the vendor could not be found. The next week was also spent in a futile search. The motorist didn’t know what to blame for the loss – his own carelessness, load-shedding or the similarity between the Rs20 and Rs5,000 currency notes.

Clear perception

When I asked Asif what kind of mobile phone he had, I expected that he had a set with raised dots as in brail. From the front pocket of his trousers, he instantly pulled out a set and showing me said: “The normal type, sir.” And before I could ask another question, he sent my cellphone ringing. A mischievous smile illuminated his face and faces of those sitting in Dawn’s reception room.

As a student of the Ida Rieu School for the Blind, he took part in social work. When I first came across him, it was September 1997. He was selling tickets for a musical concert. The concert was aimed to raise funds for a cricket tournament.

An enthusiastic cricketer, Asif says he took part in major tournaments at the domestic level. But about the international blinds’ cricket he has severe scepticism. “People with partial vision also take part in international events and therefore it cannot be called cricket for the blind.”

Blindness has never been much of a handicap for him. He travels from place to place carrying only the traditional white cane. The last I saw him, he was distributing invitation cards for his wedding. He tied his nuptial knot in late July and has been living happily since.

The girl he has married is his former classmate. “Why a blind girl?” I asked. “Yes, I could marry a normal girl. But I knew that it would have involved various psychological problems. Besides, we have studied together and know each other so well that I don’t foresee any domestic problems.”

With a monthly salary of Rs4,000, Asif works in a factory as a telephone operator. He is probably the only blind man here who can operate a keyboard. He has a specially-designed software that enables him to recognize and transfer calls to the relevant section and person.

A social worker as he is, Asif demands that the ban on jobs be lifted and the quota for the handicapped implemented judiciously.

Living in a rented house, Asif also wishes to get a government job. “But first I would like to have my own house.”

— Karachian

Email: naseer.awan@dawn.com