HYDERABAD: Raising slogans against the Sindh government and mayor of Hyderabad, activists of the Pak Sarzameen Party (PSP) on Tuesday assembled outside the local press club and held a sit-in for a few hours demanding immediate measures to ensure cleanliness in the city and make all basic amenities available to citizens.

The protesters, some of them carrying the Pakistan flag, told the media that the people of Hyderabad had long been facing a shortage of safe drinking water, excessive power load-shedding and outages, poor sanitation and crumbling civic infrastructure.

A few protesters had brought clay pitchers with them which they broke at the venue of the protest in their symbolic expression of frustration over failure of the authorities concerned in providing them drinking water in adequate quantity.

Hyderabad district PSP president Nadeem Qazi, speaking to the participants, urged the provincial government and mayor to take immediate steps for the removal of garbage found dumped at almost every street corner in the city.

He said provision of safe water and ensuring cleanliness were the foremost responsibilities of the Hyderabad Municipal Corporation which it had not been discharging efficiently.

He said that power outages and excessive load-shedding had made citizens’ lives miserable but no attention was being paid to the issue by the authorities concerned. He claimed that the city’s sewerage system was lying damaged due to which people of several localities were getting sewage mixed with water.

Mr Qazi also condemned the Hyderabad Electric Supply Com­pany (Hesco) for issuing ‘inflated’ and ‘detection’ electricity bills to consumers for a long time.

All this had forced the people of Hyderabad to take to the streets and demand their basic rights, he said.

Meanwhile, other PSP activists Kamran Khanzada, Sadam Rind, Rizwan Gaddi and Tariq Kazmi presented a set of demands to the media.

Explaining the demands, they said the Sindh Building Control Authority should be abolished and such an authority exclusively for Hyderabad be set up so that people could get their problems resolved easily.

They called for a comprehensive plan to be chalked out to systematically lift and dispose of garbage in the city.

They said that the Water and Sanitation Agency (Wasa) be revamped with a view to ensure proper and prompt supply of water to citizens as well as proper cleanliness on a day-to-day basis.

They demanded action against the ‘tanker mafia’ and an end to the unannounced power load-shedding.

“FIRs should be registered against those Hesco functionaries who were issuing detection and inflated bills to consumers without any justification,” they said.

They said mayors and deputy mayors across the country should be empowered to take proper care of their respective cities.

Local government representatives should also be given powers to resolve their respective areas’ issues, they added.

The other demands including reconstruction and repair of damaged roads, establishment of a university in the city, improvement in the traffic system to control snarl-ups, removal of encro­ach­ments, legal action against land-grabbers and proper utilisation of the funds being allocated to the city under the prime minister’s special package.

Published in Dawn, April 12th, 2017