Coal bulletin

Karachi is fast taking on the airs of the tiny Welsh village in Richard Llewellyn’s “How Green Was My Valley”, that depended on coalmining for its livelihood. No, Karachi doesn’t have a coal mine but it certainly has big dumps of coal stored in the open at the Karachi Port in Keamari. As luck would have it, Keamari lies to the west of the city from which direction the sea breeze blows in, carrying with it a layer of coal dust.

A few months ago the pile was not so noticeable. But recently it has multiplied into a number of mounds of coal that are visible to the naked eye. What is worse, they seem to be growing and growing. From the apartments along the sea shore, it seems that the coal will soon engulf the sea beach which the governor of Sindh is trying to beautify.

Vice Admiral Ahmad Hayat, the chairman of the KPT, assured this writer that this will not happen because they are aware of the problem and trying to find a solution to it. Where has the coal come from? It has been imported to be used as fuel in the industries which have converted from diesel to coal under the new energy strategy. Since we have still to discover the virtues of our own coal, say at Lakhra (about which this paper has been editorializing for decades now), the dependence on foreign coal has grown. According to the chairman, the quantity of imported coal has grown from 300,000 tonnes to 1.5 million tones last year.

“If we didn’t have a shortage of trucks, this mound wouldn’t have existed for the coal would have been carted away as soon as it arrived,” Vice Admiral Hayat says. But that wouldn’t have solved the problem of the coal dust. As the chairman himself admits, the coal dust is scattered when it is being loaded on to the trucks. “Recently we have started spraying water on the coal mounds to keep the black dust settled. And we have asked the truck drivers to keep the coal covered with tarpaulin,” he said.

How much will this help? Very little, the housewives would testify after spending hours and hours every day to sweep the black dust from their homes. What could really solve the problem is to build silos for the storage of coal. The chairman expressed reluctance to undertake this task immediately because, according to him, we still do not have a fair idea about our coal requirements. Hence it would be wasteful to build silos which may not be needed at all.

Besides, who will pay for the silos? The KPT chairman said his organization was not government funded. Hence it did not have enough resources for a project of this magnitude. The private sector would have to pitch in for this cause.

Meanwhile, as an interim measure the KPT could erect high walls around the coal mounds with gates for the trucks to enter. After all, that would be cheaper than the government spending millions on treating Karachians for chest diseases. Oops, the government doesn’t pay for people’s health care!

Missing Frere Hall evenings

Ever since Frere Hall became subject to heightened security and all visitors to the nearly 200-year-old gardens began undergoing intense scrutiny – to safeguard the nearby US concerns – the venue totally lost its carefree aura. The guards posted all around the entrances began demanding IDs and vehicles were disallowed anywhere close to the grounds of the Hall.

The Sunday book bazaar at the Frere Hall grounds was the prime attraction where the entire fraternity of booksellers put up stalls to sell books at lowered prices and where also the entire brotherhood of book lovers would converge to lustily plunge into the sea of literature. But when security began strangling harmless visitors’ movements the sellers gradually started disappearing as it was not worth their while to cart their wares for a handful of patrons. Now what one sees there is an apology for a book bazaar.

While some of the crowd has moved over to frequent the Koocha-i-Saqafat near the Arts Council where the book bazaar is now held, the ‘Hyde Park-like’ ambience surrounding the Frere Hall activity is sorely being missed by regular visitors to this Venetian-Gothic edifice, built in 1863 by the Raj to show esteem to the services rendered to Karachi by the Right Honourable Sir H. Bartle E. Frere.

A colleague, accompanied by her entire brood, would eagerly venture out on Sundays to browse through the moth-eaten editions of classics and pick out some old Agatha Christie and Georgette Heyer paperbacks. Making herself cosy on the nearby bench, she would peacefully read and munch on chaat while her husband ransacked the history books endlessly. The kids – armed with their cricket bat and ball – would do their own little antics on the lawns and thus a pleasant afternoon would be spent. Alas, the US embassy dictates and the ‘terrorr in their midst’ put a spoke in the wheel of many book lovers who cherished the lazy afternoons spent there.

With no other place in Karachi providing a similar ambience, perhaps as compensation, the said embassy should cultivate some other park on its own expense to provide the peace-loving majority of Karachi with the lazy pleasure to be had at Frere Hall. But the citizens hardly protest when the US raises its iron hand. Did anything besides a mild whimper come forth when the century old trees lining the road passing in front of the Frere Hall – also supposedly hindering security – were brutally sliced off?

United in distress

More than a week has passed since the devastating earthquake in the north, but Karachians continue to donate as generously as they did when the first reports of the Oct 8 temblor started coming in.

Impromptu camps serving as collection points for relief goods not only emerged almost overnight, but were filled to capacity within hours of being set up. These camps can be seen everywhere and not only line the pavements along major roads but can also be seen in tiny lanes in front of apartment complexes. A reliable gauge of the citizens’ response to the quake is the number of goods being airlifted or taken to the affected zone in trucks and trailers.

Within five days of the quake, scores of C-130s, packed with relief goods, had taken off for their destination from the PAF base on Sharae Faisal. Returning from work one night, another colleague nearly crashed into a long, double row of trailers parked in front of the army headquarters near Mehran hotel, obviously waiting to be loaded with relief goods. Shops too are witnessing brisk sales as people buy medicines, blankets, wheat flour, lentils and dried milk for the victims. All this is besides generous contributions to the President’s Relief Fund and announcements of one day’s salary for victims by the employees of various organizations. People are also serving as volunteers with many doctors departing for the north of the country and students working to pack and load goods. The Pakistan Medical Association is offering a free course to volunteers so that they could go to the calamity-hit areas knowing life rescue techniques.

The only redeeming feature of the devastating earthquake is that it has united the nation and created a great deal of goodwill in the city, which has often seen a lot of communal violence and sectarian strife.

— By Karachian

email: karachi_notebook@hotmail.com

Any takers for a nuclear disaster?

BEFORE THE earthquake of October 8, the disputed region of Jammu and Kashmir was widely seen as the likeliest flashpoint for a nuclear disaster. After the quake it has become ‘Ground Zero’ for unprecedented human misery.

As luck would have it, in most disaster-stricken situations in India and Pakistan as well as in Kashmir, as is now evident, it is not the state, the army or the so-called ordinary people who become the fulcrum of rescue and relief operations. In India, it is the rightwing Hindu organizations such as the RSS and Shiv Sena that reach the sites of disasters before anyone else.

In Azad Kashmir and the Frontier, religious parties like Jamaat-i-Islami and the JUI are reported to be quiet active in organizing and delivering aid and rescue.

Also, as irony would have it, all these groups are votaries of the atom bomb. The RSS and Shiv Sena, spurred by their hatred for Pakistan, advocated and got their government to carry out the 1998 nuclear tests. In Pakistan, the Jamaat-i-Islami is one of the heady campaigners for the country’s nuclear prowess. In the trauma of the Latur earthquake that destroyed vast tracts of Maharashtra in September 1993, I saw volunteers of the RSS and the Shiv Sena removing dead bodies with bare hands.

It is a tragic thought that these people, with their immense resources and zeal for voluntary work, will be completely pulverized in a nuclear war. That is the way the nuclear cookie crumbles. The tragic deaths and devastation of Azad Kashmir would be a pin-prick before the calamity which the zealots on both sides have not even thought of but seem cavalier enough to want to bring about.

Earthquakes and natural disasters have exposed the vulnerability of the mighty United States. The pun unintended, disasters are a great leveller. Indians and Pakistanis may boast of their superior camaraderie and self-help groups that help cushion and repulse catastrophes, unlike hurricane Katrina that laid bare the hollow innards of the American society. But all these good feelings would vaporize in a nuclear mushroom if one is triggered either by accident or in a fit of rage, or out of palpable insecurity of a government.

When people mourn their dead in Azad Kashmir and their friends and sympathizers from far and near rush in with instant warmth and selfless help they pay tribute to the innate humanity that is part of our people. It hardly stands to reason then that people who are grieved by the loss of 40,000 fellow humans and are distraught at the uprooting of the lives of another million or two can advocate a nuclear exchange as a means to settle scores from history.

It is all very well to exhort a vulnerable people to be prepared to eat grass for a thousand years, if that is what it takes to build a bomb. But in what is left of Muzaffarabad today, people are scrounging for food, shelter, medicines, not for a plateful of grass.

During a visit to the United States in May 2002, at the height of the India-Pakistan nuclear standoff, I picked up the just published copy of the Doomsday Scenario, written by the United States government during the Cold War to prepare for a multi-pronged Soviet missile attack. That the document became public was partly due to a clerical error at a restricted library and partly the grit of the person who put it together for the general public -– L. Douglas Keeney.

In the aftermath of the faltering and seriously deficient relief efforts in Azad Kashmir and on the Indian side of the Line of Control too, lessons from the Doomsday Scenario look all the more relevant. Someone should consider making it a mandatory reading for everyone in South Asia who advocates the use of nuclear weapons whether as a first strike option or as a second strike retaliatory weapon.

The first and the most important lesson from the book that came out of the years of painstaking research by all branches of military and civil administration, according to Keeney, was that most of the preparedness for a nuclear strike was quite useless when it came to practise. The jammed motorways in the aftermath of 9/11, the complete chaos that ruled the country for days after the attack, when even the whereabouts of the president of the United States were not disclosed to the people should remain etched in our collective memory.

“The medical care requirements are overwhelming,” says a passage from the Doomsday Scenario. Is it similar to refrain we are faced with, albeit on a much smaller scale since last week? “In addition to 25,000,000 dead or dying, there are 25,000,000 surviving casualties who require emergency medical care,” the American scenario says. “Of this number, one-half (12,500,000) are suffering from blast and thermal injuries and have immediate and evident need of treatment. Of the 25,000,000 radiation casualties, 12,500,000 have received lethal dosages and have died or will die regardless of treatment. Of the 12,500,000 remaining one-half will require hospitalization during the period of 12 weeks.”

The ordinary Indian and Pakistani have not been taken into confidence, much less briefed about the do’s and don’ts to survive a nuclear catastrophe. By contrast, the United States spent more than $45 billion to protect both senior government officials and at least some members of the general public in the event of a nuclear attack.

This funding supported everything from production and distribution of films and pamphlets instructing citizens how to mitigate the effects of a nuclear blast and fallout to the secret construction of massive underground facilities to allow the government to continue to operate during and after a nuclear war.

And yet it is still appropriate to ask, says the publisher’s note in the Doomsday Scenario: “With so much attention, and money, devoted to safeguarding government leaders and so little to protecting the public, would there be anyone or anything left to govern in the event of a truly catastrophic large-scale attack upon the United States?” That is pretty much the question people in India and Pakistan should be asking of their governments. Coping with the ravages of nature is quite enough. There is hardly any room left to take on any man-made catastrophe.

HERE IS a bit of a warning for the unscrupulous ones. Indian authorities in Jammu have arrested 19 people on charges of fraud, after they used false pretexts to collect donations in the name of quake relief.

The allegations of fraud come even as people from all communities in every part of the state have been generously donating money and other materials for the quake victims, says a news report by NDTV.

The government has now banned all unauthorized collection of earthquake relief. Any voluntary effort to collect relief will have to be registered with the local administration. The new norms have prompted many roadside relief collection stalls, which came up immediately after Saturday’s earthquake, to shut down.

Many see the move as unnecessary red-tape, which will hamper relief efforts. However, what is encouraging is that the collection of relief for the victims has become a social movement in Kashmir, and local people are coming forward in hordes to lend a hand with fighting the calamity.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

Wrong choice as capital?

THE October 8 earthquake, which devastated large areas in the Punjab, Islamabad, North-West Frontier Province and the two parts of Jammu and Kashmir, is unparalleled in South Asia’s history. The first major jolt measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale struck the cities and countryside as people had barely begun to attend to their daily routine and children had begun to arrive in schools.

It took quite a while in Islamabad for the bewildered and dazed people to realize the extent of the terrifying calamity that had befallen them. The ground under their feet shook violently as rooms and halls whirled. Within a short span of minutes, one heard that a part of the Margalla Towers had collapsed with a deafening roar. According to an eye-witness, the massive eleven-floor apartment building just crumbled to the ground like a house of cards.

The total picture of the tragedy in many parts of the country was still incomplete even a week after the earthquake struck.

People who lost everything and were left grievously wounded and injured were still not able to get the most urgently needed medical aid. Children who survived remained trapped in what was left of their school buildings for days.

What is tragically obvious at the moment is that the relief measures are too meagre, more so because of the inaccessibility of the affected areas. It might take several weeks mainly because of the rains and inclement weather to launch organized relief work. Fortunately, foreign medical assistance and rescue teams managed to reach even the remote areas of Balakot and Mansehra to attend to the wounded.

As for the capital itself, the role of official emergency services was conspicuous by its absence. The Capital Development Authority (CDA), whose primary job should be to rush all its available resources to quake victims, had not risen to the occasion and failed to launch an effective rescue and relief operation.

Credit must go to all those people in the neighbourhood who lost no time in getting together to rush aid to the badly-stricken residents — sometimes only with bare hands to pull out the trapped from the massive mounds of debris. However, it was impossible to break into the solid structure to reach the trapped inmates of the building.

A police contingent was the first to arrive on the scene about an hour later and vainly tried to control the large number of people who had blocked the way of the hooting ambulances. It took hours for the ill-equipped rescue and relief teams of workers and paramedical attendants to start operating.

It may surprise many to know that the origin of the problem in Islamabad lies in the very location of the capital.

Field Marshal Ayub Khan had ordered the new capital to be built, although a foreign town planner had warned that for geological reasons the construction of the capital was inadvisable at its present site.

A study of the site of the proposed capital at the village of Saidpur, about 10 miles out of the municipal city limits of Rawalpindi, concluded that the area was earthquake prone as it lay on the fault line. The finding was seen by a journalist when he happened to lay his hand on a three-volume report on the planning, construction and development of the new capital. A well-known American town planner, Edward Stone, engaged in planning the new capital had identified unsuitability of the Saidpur village as a capital city after having analyzed the rock structure and the relevant data.

He had stated that the proposed site was located on an earthquake fault line and would be in danger of being hit by an earthquake of high magnitude. The place was also water-scarce. He particularly warned against constructing buildings having more than three storeys because the rocky underground would not allow foundations deep enough for taller buildings.

Ayub Khan, who seized power in October 1958, wanted to relocate the country’s seat near GHQ. In opting for Saidpur, Ayub Khan ruled out Karachi as the capital city, because he thought it was dominated by commercial and bureaucratic interests.

It may be recalled that the Quaid-i-Azam in his lifetime had finally selected Karachi and its suburbs, including Gadap and Malir, to be the capital of Pakistan. He favoured Karachi for several reasons. He liked the temperate climate of the breezy port city and believed that the Bengalis from East Pakistan would also find the city climate congenial. Karachi was ideally located — having land, sea and air routes for easy passage to and from East Pakistan and sea and air routes to the outside world.

The unfortunate fact is that even now Islamabad is administered as a commissioner’s territory directly under the federal government, with the citizens having no participation in its affairs and development. No civic elections have ever been held, and it was excluded like all the cantonment areas in the country from the newly-introduced local government scheme.

One of Ayub Khan’s dreams remains unfulfilled: he wanted not a soul more than 80,000 in Islamabad. Now its population is between 600,000 and 800,000.

The CDA functions like an autonomous bureaucratic body impervious to public participation in any manner. This has also led the CDA to ignore all necessary rules and regulations to ensure technically safe construction of houses and buildings in the public and private sectors. All this led to the tragic end of the Margalla Towers.

The non-representation of citizens in Islamabad’s governance has also resulted in rampant corruption in the high-powered body.

The CDA is aptly described by many as the “Corruption Development Authority” where any kind violation of CDA laws and by-laws can be condoned by paying illegal gratification. Unless the CDA affairs are conducted in a purely transparent and accountable manner and some elected public body like a local government is set up here to oversee the functioning of the CDA, there can be no hope of bringing about any improvement in its working.