PESHAWAR, July 8: Working women in the provincial metropolis are facing accommodation problem as the few private hostels in the city are not only overcrowded but also very expensive.

Professional women here are already facing many problems because of conservative customs and various social and tribal taboos. Many women who moved here from various districts of the province for work are able to find a job, but due to lack of accommodation facilities they are forced to leave their job and return to their hometowns.

Most of the women do not tell their families about the problem of accommodation in the city, fearing that their family would simply ask them to quit their jobs.

“If a working woman who belongs to a respectable family luckily gets permission from her parents for a job cannot tell her parents about the accommodation problem because they would simply tell her to leave her hard-earned job,” a woman working for an NGO told Dawn.

Many working women who live in hostels also face the problem of overcrowding.   In a 19-room women hostel in Hayatabad area 30 girls live without proper facilities. “There is no mess facility here. There is no refrigerator, TV set or common room where we can mingle with other,” Samina, who lives here said.

Mostly a single room is shared by three women. Girl students and working women who come to the city from far-off places share rooms. They live in small overcrowded cubicles because they have no other option.

The rents of working women hostels vary within the city. They range between Rs1,000 and Rs1,900 but the problems are same everywhere. “Rules and regulations also vary from hostel to hostel and in some cases not applicable evenhandedly,” Samina observed.

Some time back the Directorate of Women Development and Social Welfare Department had planned to open a hostel for working women on Jamrud Road, but later the officials themselves occupied the building and set up their offices.

The two-storey building has 10 spacious rooms. While rooms on the first floor are vacant. Those on the ground floor are being used as office by the Social Welfare Department.

“The Directorate of Farm Water Management set up its offices in the building originally meant for the Social Welfare Department. So the department was left with no alternative but to establish its office in the building for women hostel,” an official told Dawn.

“One obstacle in opening the hostel is the recruitment of proper hostel staff, including a warden, sweeper, cook and gate-keepers, due to which the hostel could not be opened,” an official at the Social welfare Department told Dawn.

A committee, comprising Additional Secretary of Social Welfare Department Shala Khan, Director Zarina Imdad, Additional Advocate-General Musarrat Hilali and Resident Director of Aurat Foundation Ms Rakhshinda, was was given the task to appoint staff but for some unknown reasons the hostel could not be opened so far.