IMAGINE a country where 99.9 per cent of the citizens cannot file their complex and convoluted tax returns without hiring the services of tax lawyers. Imagine a country whose railway operates with 315 employees per train but refuses to learn from the Japanese who perform the same task with only 5.9 employees. Imagine a country that is stuck with a burgeoning total fertility rate of 3.6, but will remain oblivious to how Bangladesh reduced its TFR from 6.9 in 1971 to 1.9 in 2024.

Imagine a country whose Supreme Court operates with 833 employees but will not consider how the UK’s supreme court works with only 64 on its payroll. Imagine a country that gives 150,000 government vehicles as a bribe to its officials, which no other country does. Imagine a country that gives 60pc of its workers less than the minimum wage and will not ask why Switzerland jailed a multibillionaire for denying minimum wage to a single employee.

If there is one Pakistani who shattered this cycle, looked outwards and learnt to compete with the world’s best, it was a boy from a mudbrick home in Mian Channu. The results were outstanding. Most Pakistanis, however, appear to have succumbed to a state of learned helplessness.

So here is a simple, feasible, indigenous proposal. It is to force the prime minister and the entire parliament to spend a week (at their own expense) in the valley of natural beauty and crystal clear rivers, nestled in Pakistan’s majestic Karakoram range, called Hunza. There are numerous useful lessons they can learn from Hunza that can be emulated, on a self-help basis and without begging the IMF for one more cent.

Hunza and a boy from Mian Channu have shown that it’s possible.

The first lesson we can learn is to stop releasing 99.9pc of our entire untreated raw sewage into ponds, lakes, nullahs, rivers and the sea. Hunza treats all its sewage and does not let a drop trickle down to pollute the heavenly Hunza river or the breathtaking Attabad lake. Each set of shops, buildings, homes and villages have their own dual septic tanks, confining the sewage and enabling the sludge to be used as fertiliser.

On the contrary, Karachi’s proposed S-III sewage treatment project that began its life with a budget of Rs8 billion in 2007 has already crossed the Rs45bn mark — with nothing to show for it. The existing ‘sewerage’ thinking, driven by contractual kickbacks, lust for foreign loans and a dysfunctional bureaucracy has accomplished zero sewage treatment in 76 years. We could emulate the Hunza model (and its improved version of constructed wetlands) in every town and village of Pakistan at a negligible cost.

One does not see any obscene double-cabin ‘Vigos’ with gun-toting goons on the streets of Hunza. Carrying and displaying weapons is prohibited and rigidly enforced, a much-needed lesson for the rest of the country. Every few weeks our provincial governments make phony announcements prohibiting the carrying and display of weapons. Karachi’s DHA spent millions on displaying thousands of ‘Say no to guns’ posters every few hundred yards. But there is never any resolve behind these eyewash measures, resulting in an escalating proliferation of arms and violence. Can we not learn from Hunza?

Karachi deploys about 12,000 contracted sanitation workers to clean the trash that we are allowed and even encouraged to throw on our streets. These workers receive less than half the legal minimum wage, no EOBI and no social security. Their lives could well be at par, if not worse than those of 16th-century slaves. How does Hunza clean its streets? First, littering is prohibited. Second, shops, homes and the adjoining areas are cleaned by the residents themselves. Third, garbage is retained indoors, packed in bags and placed at a designated location in each street, from where it is colle­c­ted by municipality vans at a fixed hour each day. Thus a sensible government and a motiv­ated citizenry save billions of rupees every month. This self-help system makes Hunza streets cleaner than those in most towns in Pakistan. Can we emulate Hunza’s street-cleaning model?

Unlike the 28m out-of-school Pakistani children, every Hunzai child goes to a school. The literacy level is 90pc, a factor that helps in spreading and understanding civic and environmental instructions and issues. There is a huge downstream impact clearly manifested in smaller families, cleaner public toilets, orderly queues and courteous policemen.

Huge credit for Hunza’s development goes to the Aga Khan Development Network for its thoughtful focus on education, environment, and more recently, software, digital technology, high-speed internet and solar power plants to replace diesel power generation. Pakistan can begin to learn, emulate and compete with the best in the world — as brilliantly demonstrated by the boy from Mian Channu and the heavenly valley of Hunza.

The writer is an industrial engineer and a volunteer social activist.

Published in Dawn, August 24th, 2024