“It’s been a long day,” complains Sulaiman Jakhro, a flood victim who has been queuing up outside the District Council Office in Makli since the past nine hours. “I came at nine in the morning and now its 6pm,” he complains. Jakhro is here to collect Complaint Redressal Forms from Nadra, a system through which flood victims can protest against the decision of non-issuance of the much coveted Watan card.

A resident of Faqir Jo Goth that comes under the Kalakot Union Council in Thatta, Jakhro claims that his area was the first to be breached. This, he asserts, consequently resulted in flooding that swiftly spread to other areas in the district. Since then Jakhro, has been running from pillar to post to get the assistance promised to him and many others by the government.

According to Jakhro, some people in their village were able to obtain Watan cards, however, many like him still await their turn. “I know of 250 people in my village, who have been denied this provision,” he asserts. Jakhro reveals that despite visiting the Nadra office on a regular basis he was denied access to the Watan card that would go a long way in providing for him and his family’s needs. It is a futile cause he says, “Sometime they (Nadra officials) say office hours have ended, sometimes they decry the unpredictable electricity supply. When you come the next day they say that they’ve run out of tokens!” According to an angry Ghulam Mustafa from Tando Hafiz Shah, 90km from Makli, almost equal to that from Karachi, “Nadra officials did not issue our cards and now they desist from issuing Redressal Forms too.” He alleges the presence of agents, who demand bribes, “Rs1,000 for a form,” he adds.

Mir Mohammad Soomro, another Tando Hafiz Shah resident endorses Mustafa’s observations, adding that a Watan card can be bought for Rs5,000. “Why don’t they understand that if we had that kind of money to throw away we wouldn’t be languishing here,” he says. He laments the amount that he spends while commuting between his home and Makli, saying that he spends a fortune every time he visits the DC Office in hope of obtaining a card.

Most flood victims gathered at the DC Office claim that they have been standing in the queue since the wee hours of the morning. “I have been here since 3am,” says Noor Mohammad who hails from Tando Hafiz Shah as well. “The Nadra officials come to work with a stack of cards in hand that is handed to middlemen. This creates hurdles for the poor, leaving them stranded for hours on end at the DC Office, without any help.”

Refuting all such allegations, Pir Mukhtayar Ali Shah, a local administrator at the DC office, says that Nadra officials, in the course of each working day try to deal with as many cases as they can. “Today we distributed 500 forms,” he claims, to which the queued flood victims, retorted in chorus, “When not even a 100 people were in the queue?”

According to Mohammad Hassan Mallah, President of The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) from Mangal do Mehar, a village in Mirpur Bathero Tehsil, the main hurdle in achieving maximum registrations is a dearth of computers. He asserts, that the DC Office in Makli has just one machine, which makes dealing with multiple cases at one time a daunting task.

Sources reveal that a total of 475,000 Watan cards have been distributed in Sindh so far. Reasons cited for delay being the change of head of family status, not shared with Nadra and de-notification of areas that were initially declared flood-affected by the government.

There have been instances where some residents received the card and were able to encash it as well, however, after being de-notified, many names and identity card numbers belonging to residents of those areas were removed from the database. This has created great confusion, adds the source, who feels that Nadra needlessly bears the brunt for this.

He emphasises, counter to popular belief that Nadra officials at different Centres do not wield the power to add names to the database.

All of this, they believe, is done at the provincial level, and that the DCO is wholly responsible for forwarding the names of flood victims to the Provincial Disaster Management Authority, who then pass these on to the Nadra Headquarters in Islamabad. Once these names are fed in the database and they pass the screening process, cards are dispatched at different Nadra centres to the victims.

Similarly in case of submission of the Redressal Forms, sources claim, that unless approved by the DCO, no Redressal Form can be forwarded. But flood victims decry non-availability of forms, claiming that approval by the DCO is the next level, which cannot be attained if this situation continues.—Gloria Caleb