PESHAWAR, May 6: Speakers at a seminar on Sunday demanded of the government to immediately resume the construction work at the Lowari tunnel to connect Chitral with Peshawar, suspended by Gen Ziaul Haq after staging a military coup in 1977.
The day-long seminar was jointly organised by the Chitral Journalists Forum and Peshawar Press Club to highlight the importance of the Lowari tunnel’s early completion in mitigating the people’s troubles.
Human Rights Commission Chairman Afrasiab Khattak, Qazi Anwar advocate, Education Minister Imtiaz Hussain Gilani, a former NWFP Chief Engineer Zahooruddin, Chitral’s Nazim Shahzada Mohiuddin, Tanzeem Tahaffuz Haqooq-i-Chitral leader Abdul Akbar Khan, Sharif Shakaib and others spoke on the issue.
Afrasiab Khattak said the suspension of work on Lowari tunnel was one of the crimes committed by dictator Ziaul Haq to deprive over 400,000 people of their basic right of transportation and road. “When winter arrives and snow heaps upon the Lwari top, the people of Chitral are physically cut off from the rest of the country,” he added.
He said the HRCP had highlighted the Lowari tunnel problem as a denial of a basic right to a large section of people. The Lowari tunnel and issues like this could be addressed only by changing practices of uneven development made by successive governments, he added.
The construction of Lowari tunnel was a basic necessity of the people, but the government had squandered millions of dollars on an unimportant Motorway between Lahore and Islamabad, he added.
He underlined the need for allocating the financial resources on priority basis to cater to the needs of the most needy.
He said over 80 per cent of the national budget was being spent on non-development sector which would aggravate the socio-economic conditions in the future, he added.
Whenever, he said, the World Bank and IMF asked the government to reduce its non-development expenditures, Islamabad cut the development expenditures. This state of affairs, in which the establishment was getting fat, had transformed the country into a resource-constrained state, he added.
If the government wanted to expand its trade up to the Central Asian Republics, it should develop areas like Chitral, abutting the CARs, he observed.
Qazi Mohammad Anwar hoped that President Gen Pervez Musharraf would fulfil his promise regarding the construction of the Lowari tunnel on priority basis.
He said it was the only way which linked Chitral with the rest of the country, he added.
He said Chitralis, who were a patriotic lot, had been demanding for the last 24 years for the completion of this project. He said “credit goes to Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto who had asked the WFO to construct the tunnel. The WFO dug up some 1,950 feet, but the Zia regime stopped it”.
Shahzada Mohiuddin also read out a list of problems faced with Chitral people. He asked the government to provide electricity, science teachers and telephone facility to his area people.
Eng Zahoor, Abdul Akbar Khan and others also demanded of the government to immediately start construction work on the tunnel.