Contaminated water menace

THE Tehsil Municipal Administration (TMA) has failed to overcome the menace of water-borne diseases caused by contaminated and unhygienic drinking water in Sialkot’s urban union councils.

According to TMA officials, the entire city was in the grip of rapidly spreading water-borne diseases and no one has come up with a solution of this burning issue.

About a month ago, the Sialkot health department and public health department had declared the water of the city’s 16 union councils as contaminated and unhygienic for common use. These departments had also declared as unfit for human consumption the water being supplied by the Tehsil Municipal Administration.

District Health Officer (DHO) Dr Javaid Warraich said the TMA was supplying contaminated and unhygienic water through its 33 tubewells. The DO (Health) said that citizens of Sialkot had been suffering from water-borne diseases, including cholera, hepatitis A and gastroenteritis, due to the use of this contaminated water. He said that this water was being supplied via rusted and broken pipelines. He said the population of Sialkot still remained at great risk. He said that a major cause of this contamination was stated to be the underground broken water pipelines and sewerage lines.

Health department officials suggested that the TMA should install modern water filtration plants in all thickly-populated areas of the city, besides installing chlorine machines along tubewells for purifying the water.

The PHED department had directed the TMA officials to immediately change the damaged underground pipelines in the larger public interest. As many as 600 feet-deep water boring system is also direly needed for ensuring the provision of potable water. Most of the turbines are only 300 to 350 feet deep.

The Health department officials feared that gastroenteritis was likely to break out in the city’s congested residential areas if the TMA did not take emergency remedial measures. TMA officials said that around Rs.35 million were required for changing the underground pipelines.

THE Sialkot district government has planned to organise workshops and seminars in all the 122 urban and rural union councils of the district for raising public awareness about HIV/AIDS in collaboration with the business community and NGOs.

According to District Nazim Muhammad Akmal Cheema, the main object of holding these workshops and seminars is to raise AIDS awareness among industrial workers and labourers.

The Sialkot district is HIV/AIDS free as no AIDS case has yet been detected here. He said that industrial workers and labourers could be helpful in promoting awareness of preventive measures about HIV/AIDS in any society.

However, collective and positive steps are direly needed to check these fatal diseases through the large-scale promotion of preventive measures. Meanwhile, the Directorate of Workers Education (DWE), Islamabad, has established its regional centre in Sialkot. The DWE has been playing a pivotal role in promoting awareness about important issues including HIV/AIDS, among industrial workers and their families.

THousands of telephone bills have been lying undelivered at the Daska head post office. The PTCL had fixed Nov 25 as the last date for depositing these bills. Thousands of subscribers in Daska expressed grave concern over this situation, as majority of them are unable to pay their telephone bills and face the threat of disconnection due to non-payment of bills. The perturbed subscribers told reporters that the Daska PTCL revenue department’s officials were adopting a sluggish aptitude towards subscribers visiting their office to seek duplicate bills. Officials are diverting the duplicate bill seekers to the Daska head post office.

THE Asian Development Bank (ADB) has provided Rs400 million grant to the federal government for upgrading and modernizing the Sialkot’s export-oriented sports goods industry to meet global challenges under the WTO regime. Business Sport Funds chief operating officer Ali Sarfraz said this while addressing a meeting organized by the Pakistan Sports Goods Manufacturers and Exporters Association (PSGMEA) here. PSGMEA chairman Prof Sheikh Safdar Sandal and BSF’s Miss Aiysha Malik were also present on the occasion.

Mr Ali Sarfraz said the government would provide ADB development funds to those firms having annual exports of not less than Rs300 million and with at least 250 employees. He said that each firm would get a maximum of Rs1.8 million fund which could not be utilized for the construction of building, purchase of new machinery and disbursing of wages.

Tourism promotion going nowhere?

THE way that we are going about promoting tourism in general and the Visit Pakistan 2007 in particular, it would not be surprising if the number of foreign visitors in 2007 remains a low figure of barely a million (which includes many Overseas Pakistanis).

To promote tourism, one of the many things we need to do - as many countries which have made their tourist industry a major foreign exchange earner have done - is to launch an aggressive campaign to market our tourism interests by organising familiarisation trips in Pakistan for tour operators, travel agents and journalists from the target countries or regions.

In our case, not only is the budgetary allocation for tourism under the Public Sector Development Programme measly (only Rs115 million for the year 2006-2007) with earnings from the tourism sector remaining as insignificant as ever before in our Gross Domestic Product, instead of inviting foreign tour operators to Pakistan we are aggressively sending our own leaders on expensive trips abroad ostensibly to promote tourism in Pakistan but in actuality achieving practically zero result for our tourism industry.

As was reported recently, our prime minister and federal tourism minister had launched the Visit Pakistan 2007 in New York this month at a dinner gathering for about 400 guests, of whom some 80 per cent were Pakistanis. The wisdom of our choice of the US as a prime target for potential tourists in Pakistan is questionable, particularly since the US government (and many other western governments) has still not lifted a strong advisory to its ‘vulnerable’ citizens against travel to Pakistan first imposed several years ago.

While other tourism promoting governments like Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Mauritius, South Africa, Hong Kong, etc., have been scrambling to attract the prized, high spending Arab tourists from the Gulf countries, who together spend more than $12 billion on annual international vacations with one Arab tourist reportedly spending US$1,700 per trip (US$500 higher than what the average European traveller spends per trip), we seem to be quite content with attracting only the low spending visitors like Buddhist monks and other pilgrims.

Malaysia has been particularly successful in seizing the opportunity to attract the high-spending Arab travellers in the aftermath of 9/11, when the Middle East outbound tourist traffic underwent a complete restructuring as Arab tourists boycotted American and European cities.

Malaysia’s success is evident in the following figures of Arab tourists visiting the country: 50,000 in 1999, 126,000 in 2004; 150,000 in 2005; and the target for 2006 is reportedly 200,000 Arab tourists.

It is easy to see why Malaysia has succeeded in winning over the Arab tourists and in making tourism a top foreign exchange earner for the country whereas we have failed, despite the fact that we share two things in common with Malaysia which the Arabs feel at home — Islamic culture and tradition, and warm, hospitable people.

Apart from security and safety, infrastructure and promotion campaigns are the other key factors accounting for on the one hand Malaysia’s success in attracting millions of tourists annually and on the other our ability to attract hardly a million visitors a year, most of whom are Overseas Pakistanis at that.

Already equipped with the appropriate services and communication infrastructure, which is an important base for the tourism industry, all the Malaysian government needed to do was to launch an aggressive promotion campaign targeted at the Middle East outbound tourist traffic. In no time, Kuala Lumpur city and resorts like Pulau Langkawi and Penang became favourite destinations for Arab holiday makers.

Despite pressure on the Malaysian government in 2002 to tighten its immigration rules towards Arab tourists and visitors on the charge that the relaxed rules were the reason for the infiltration of Al-Qaeda members into the country, Kuala Lumpur refused to comply and continued to roll out the red carpet for Arab tourists.

Pakistan did make a meek move to enter the Middle East outbound tourism market in May 2003 when it participated for the first time in the annual Arabian Travel Market in Dubai, dubbed as the largest tourism exhibition in the Gulf region. However, lacking the modern infrastructural tourism facilities which the high-spending Arab tourists demanded, Pakistan’s effort only proved to be a damp squid.

Failure to tap into the growing potential of the Middle East market means that we are not only losing out to Malaysia but increasingly to Indonesia also. The latter already had 44,000 Arab visitors in 2005 and Jakarta reportedly intends to increase this to 100,000 in 2007 and 500,000 in 2010.

Even non-Muslim countries like Thailand and Hong Kong have registered unparalleled increase in the Middle East tourist traffic in recent years.

One writer in Dawn last week suggested that we should think big and set a target of two million tourists in 2012. This is a pitiful target when compared with say, Malaysia, which alone had 12.7 million tourists in total in 2001, 14 million tourists in 2004, 16 million tourists in 2005, and is aiming at a target of 20 million tourists in total in 2010!

Even Turkey reportedly had 11 million tourists in 2001, 13 million in 2002 and 14 million in 2004. Egypt reportedly also had 8 million tourists in 2004 and 9 million in 2005. And even Morocco had 3.5 million visitors in 2004.

Given the pace of development of our services and communications infrastructure, particularly air communication, and the focus of attention of our leaders and politicians, and so long as tourism promotion remains low on the rung of our priorities Visit Pakistan 2007 notwithstanding, perhaps even two million tourists by 2012 is an ambitious target!

Is someone holding India hostage?

SONIA Gandhi recently made a startling statement about her husband's premonition of death, but it went largely unnoticed. Describing her meeting with Rajiv after Indira Gandhi was assassinated on an October morning in 1984, she told a TV channel recently: "My husband was away. He was in West Bengal. He arrived and came straight to the hospital. It was a very difficult moment. He did say that is what was expected of him (to step into his mother's shoes) and I did beg him not to take that responsibility. I did say that, because I thought he would be killed too. He replied he would be killed in any case."

So Rajiv and Sonia knew that Rajiv would be inevitably killed whether or not he became prime minister? And who did they both think were going to target the future prime minister of India? We all parrot the easier lines. Sikh bodyguards killed Indira Gandhi at her residence in 1984. A Sri Lankan Tamil woman suicide bomber assassinated Rajiv Gandhi in Siriperembudur in 1991 and, of course, Sanjay Gandhi died because he was playing the fool with a private plane, plunging to his death near his mother's home.

Since the LTTE was not even remotely an issue for India on the day of Indira Gandhi's death, when the exchange with Sonia took place, the source of Rajiv Gandhi's fears was evidently elsewhere. Was he alluding to Sikh insurgents because they had got his mother in a shower of bullets with frightening ease? Would he be killed "in any case", by the same Sikh rebels? Is that what he was afraid of but defied nevertheless to become prime minister? Yes. It could be a possible source of worry. And that is why perhaps the prime minister's security detail ever since does not have a single Sikh personnel, even more ironically for a prime minister who is himself a Sikh – at a time when the army chief too is a Sikh. But to consider not becoming prime minister because a bunch of terrorists were out to get him? It's a little difficult to digest.

No that's not what Sonia Gandhi and her husband were afraid of. There had to be something more menacing, more capable of striking at will, more entrenched and threatening. Were the two thinking of a foreign country, as his mother was given to fearing about. An extremely powerful foreign agency perhaps? Or some highly motivated people within the Indian system itself, or both? These are probably very old questions, but unanswered questions nevertheless. They are relevant today because the threat to the future prime minister, should there be another from the Gandhi family, still looms large. Or has that threat waned.

A reasonable approach to these questions would be to scan the various anti-bodies that surrounded the Gandhis in their moment of crisis. There were three or four things that Rajiv Gandhi did during his turbulent five-year rule and later as opposition leader that may offer clues into his death.

To begin with, in his early days as prime minister, Rajiv had annoyed the business lobbies within his own party by declaring a war on the "politics of moneybags". The purported author of that famous speech in Mumbai in 1985 was believed to be Mani Shankar Aiyar, once Rajiv's man Friday. It is possible that the business lobbies that felt threatened by him had rejoiced at his death. But could they have plotted his extermination? Only as conduits, if at all.

Then there were political rivals within his Congress party, some of whom had approached President Zail Singh to dismiss his government. The commissions of inquiry that went into the assassinations of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi pointed to the possibility of the enemy within. But there's a global angle too. In the Cold War context, Indira Gandhi was seen as a Soviet protégé. She had often spoken of the threat from the CIA and from the Hindu revivalist RSS. Both are believed to have penetrated her porous Congress party and successfully destabilised her from within.

Indira Gandhi's emergency rule between 1975 and 77 was supported by the pro-Soviet Communist Party of India. In a post-Vietnam world, with the United States looking to avenge its humiliating exit from Saigon, Indira's move to fortify herself against the swirling threat from the right was of a piece with the global pattern. Within a short span Mujibur Rehman was assassinated in Bangladesh, Bhutto in Pakistan, Allende overthrown in Chile, the Iranian and Afghan revolutions were brewing with Soviet support and Zia ul Haq was being groomed to wage jihad with motivated Muslim foot soldiers against the communist government in Kabul. If we look around further there would be more examples of the global cat and mouse.

So CIA definitely. It must be a source of worry to Rajiv Gandhi. And why not? If we regard his proximity to the Soviet leaders of his time, his landmark handshake with Deng Xiaopeng and his strident disapproval of the Chandrasekhar government's refuelling facilities given to American war planes that were heading for the Gulf during the first war against Iraq. All this made him stick out like a sore thumb with the Americans. Just compare the two situations. BJP's foreign minister Jaswant Singh invites American troops to fight the Afghan war from Indian soil. And here was Mr Gandhi unrelenting on a core principle against foreign troops.

It is of course no longer embarrassing for an Indian to be identified as a CIA man. Some of them wear the proximity like a badge of honour. The Pew survey, not the most reliable yardstick, nevertheless showed Indians as resolutely supportive of President Bush when everyone else seemed to have deserted his destructive policies. The new flavour in India is America. Forget the Indira Gandhi days, no one today talks anymore about the CIA's presence in India, about its ability to penetrate the nation's polity, to strike deep inside its labyrinthine security agencies, of its insatiable appetite for informants and assassins, for moles inside the country's armed forces, for stealing invaluable secrets. (And gullible as we are, we continue to capture in droves the Jama Masjid-type looking men with some yellow paper that contains a secret map for Pakistan, Nepal or Bangladesh. Is there any secret left to be sold after the National Security Council was cleaned out very recently by we know who?)

Is it wrong to fear the worst under the given circumstances? Why did the most crucial file on Rajiv Gandhi's assassination disappear from Prime Minister Rao's office? Is it outlandish to suspect that India's lurch to the right was plotted with the help of key assassinations? And the answer should come from Sonia Gandhi. Who is threatening her that she decided to surrender a mandate that was hers to a bunch of people who have either never won an election or were defeated in the last polls. Only she can tell if someone is holding the country hostage, someone who perhaps controls the stock markets that rocked like an earthquake when she was about to be anointed in May 2004.

Someone she had in mind in her interview recently.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

‘Ideas’ not so good

With President Pervez Musharraf, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and many foreign dignitaries visiting this city, last week proved to be the week of Ideas — the International Defence Exhibition and Seminar — which was held in the city for a fourth time.

While the federal government signed MoUs (memorandums of understanding) for the sale of armament, the Sindh governor, the chief minister and other officials basked in the reflected glory. The common people suffered. Of course, those living near the Expo Centre, the epicentre of the activity, experienced greater inconvenience than the residents of other localities. These residents’ movement was badly hampered as roads were blocked all around.

People visiting the Civic Centre, which currently houses the city government headquarters, also had their share of trouble. On the first day, Monday, the centre was closed at noon because the president was to inaugurate the exhibition across the road. On the following days, too, officials and visitors had to manoeuvre their way into the Civic Centre building.

The other sufferers were those who used the road on which is located the Expo Centre. They stood in traffic jams for hours on end. Children with schools in the vicinity were particularly inconvenienced.

City Nazim Mustafa Kamal had announced holiday for the first day. Though many parents saw it as an academic loss, it was a wise thing to do as far as the affected areas were concerned. But what about the other days? Concerned parents everyday rang up newspaper offices to find out if more holidays had been declared or not.

Unusually strict security measure were in place on account of the exhibition. Police were here, there and everywhere — many not in uniforms, and hence invisible. But heightened security could not deter robbers from their usual business as many incidents of motorcycle and mobile phone snatchings occurred close to the Expo Centre.

With the population growing at a rapid pace and the number of vehicles increasing in proportion, it is not prudent to hold such exhibitions in the heart of the city. Just imagine what the situation would be like when Ideas takes place at this very place in 2007, 2008 and beyond.

With tanks rumbling past apartment buildings and planes and missile models on display, people have already begun questioning the wisdom of holding this kind of heavyweight exhibition at the Expo Centre. They ask why Ideas cannot be shifted to a comparatively isolated place, or at least out of the city precincts. After all, it is not for the common people.

The five-day event concluded on Friday, when the public was allowed to visit the venue and see the exhibits from close quarters. A joint display of military skills and equipment by all the three forces in the sea off Manora thrilled the onlookers.

This again proves that the Expo Centre at Hasan Square is not a proper place for such a mega event. A bigger piece of land along the coast could serve the purpose better.

A killer span of road

Newspaper pictures showed on Tuesday a mangled car sitting on the side of Korangi Road’s stretch running through the Malir riverbed. Reports said that a bus of the 17-J route had first hit a motorcycle and then crushed the car. Two men — Ali Hassan and Akbar Ali — in the car were killed on the spot while two others — Mohammad Husain and Nisar — were injured. The reports did not give more details about the victims and how their families received the news and what the death meant to them in economic terms. This particular stretch of the road has been extremely prone to accidents. It has already claimed many lives. On its both ends are ramps climbing over the dykes along the Malir river. Vehicles from both directions charge at full speed to climb the ramp in top gear. Overcrowded buses roar at their maximum speed, warning the slow- moving, smaller vehicles to either give the way or be crushed.

There is no median dividing the road and keeping traffic from two sides apart. And its southern edge opens at a considerable height with no bulwark to stop vehicles from plunging down.

When the then governor of Sindh, Mohammedmian Soomro, inaugurated the expansion project of the road between the Hino Chowrangi and Korangi Crossing on April 12, 2002, the former city nazim, Niamatullah Khan, had admitted that the width of the road had been compromised for certain reasons. One could be the shops lining the road at Bhitai Colony. There could have been the problem of funds then.

Many lives can be saved if the needful is done. And soon!

Back to Koocha

The weekly Koocha-i-Saqafat held every Sunday on M.R. Kayani Road, between the Arts Council roundabout and the Shaheen Complex intersection, has resumed.

The most remarkable feature of this cultural street is its book bazaar. Here you may find rare books — and at a discount. But that may be only for booklovers and students. There are many more art and cultural activities for visitors. Schoolchildren enjoy special curricular and extracurricular events.

The current nip in the air may give the place a romantic touch as families visit various stalls set up under lit-up canopies, buy items of their choice and relish spicy food items.

Since its inauguration last year, Sindh Governor Ishratul Ibad has lent his wholehearted support to the cultural event. On separate occasions the governor has not only announced funds for the Koocha, he has also used the platform to abolish the entertainment tax on cinema houses, a long- standing demand of the theatre owners and representatives of film industry. But this waiver seems to have helped little to prop the crumbling industry, whose good days seem to be decidedly over.— Karachian

Email: naseer.awan@dawn.com