Managing unruly traffic at a busy square in Rawalpindi for eight consecutive hours, a handsome young man who holds an MPhil degree, looks crestfallen. It is a mixture of dejection and anger.

He gets even angrier, he says, when senior traffic wardens, who are not even fully matriculate, order him around like an underling.

“Several other like myself have been duped by the rulers of Punjab,” he says. “There are other traffic wardens also who hold postgraduate degrees. But here, we are assigned duties that degrades us and ignore our qualifications,” he complains.

The PML-Q government in Punjab had recruited 6,850 graduate traffic wardens in 2006 for the five big cities of Punjab: Lahore, Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, Gujranwala and Multan, in a bid to remodel the traffic police along modern lines.

Traffic wardens project was initiated by former chief minister Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, but has been put on the back burner by Shahbaz Sharif

But his government did not last long and his party lost the 2008 elections to the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Shahbaz Sharif took over as chief minister of Punjab.

Since the traffic warden project was a brainchild of Pervaiz Elahi, the new chief minister completely sidelined it.

The basic qualification for the post of traffic warden was BA/BSc and it was claimed that the rank of a traffic warden who would be recruited in BS 14 would be equal to that of a sub-inspector of the Punjab police.

Thousands of young graduates, including women, applied for the posts. Many of them were pursuing masters degrees and had to abandon their studies to join the Punjab Traffic Wardens Service in the hope of finding a better future. Most of them have been in service for the past eight years but still do not have a proper service structure. “We are still exactly where we were eight years ago,” laments a traffic warden. The uncertainty has severely lowered the morale of traffic wardens.

“We joined the force with a firm resolve that we would perform our duty with full devotion and dedication and our newly created force would emerge as one of the best traffic police but we were naive as neither the then Punjab government nor the present one did anything for us,” he adds.

Traffic wardens were particularly annoyed with the Shahbaz Sharif dispensation as they feel that it has done nothing for them.

This dampened the spirits of traffic wardens who now come to the square just to pass time.

Initially inspectors from the erstwhile Punjab Traffic Police, which was known for its corruption, were appointed as STWs. The traffic wardens were assured that after three years they would be picked up as STW on the basis of their performance. But the promise has never been fulfilled.

Although the police authorities issue letters time and again in which they claimed that the service structure of traffic wardens have been formulated but practically nothing has been done.

According to an order issued in June 2013 by former Inspector General of Police Khan Baig, only those traffic wardens will be promoted who have completed five year service and have qualified three-month traffic management course (TMC) and obtained at least 70 per cent marks.

If they fulfill the criteria then the promotion board will look into their case and give promotion on the basis of district wise seniority cum fitness. But this fresh order has yet to be implemented.

“The service structure of traffic wardens has been formulated and two batches have been passed out after completing mandatory course of traffic management for promotion,” says Chief Traffic Officer Rawalpindi Shoaib Khurram Janbaz. “A promotion board would be notified within a month”, he adds.

But a senior officer in Lahore sees no end to the worries of traffic wardens. “Whatever plan for their promotion you outline, it will fail and the poor traffic wardens would be retired in the same rank in which they were recruited,” the official says. “Under the current plan, hardly 20 per cent could be promoted,” he adds. “The traffic warden system was created in a haphazard manner, without any planning and purely on political grounds. That is why the mess cannot be resolved,” he maintained.

According to the initial plan, these traffic wardens would also get training of elite force and would be armed with pistols to curb street crimes.

But the idea could not prove successful. When first batch of trained traffic wardens came on the roads, they were armed with pistols which were taken back in 2008 when a traffic warden in Lahore opened fire on a group of students after a brief clash with them. Thus the idea of controlling street crimes through traffic wardens backfired.

“To arm traffic wardens with pistols was an unreasonable idea which was bound to fail,” says a senior official.

The government spent millions of rupees on buying motorcycles for each traffic warden and buses to provide the facility of pick and drop. As traffic wardens do not have residential quarters, they live in rented flats located in different areas of the cities. They use their own motorcycles instead of departmental ones.

“If we use departmental motorcycle, first we have to go to Police Lines to get a departmental motorcycle issued then we have to park that motorcycle there after finishing our duty, which is a time-consuming and tiresome practice. That is why we use our own motorcycles,” says a traffic warden.

“The traffic wardens service neither has service structure nor has infrastructure,” an official said.

Unlike the Punjab Traffic Police, Motorway Police and Islamabad Traffic Police, the traffic wardens do not have share in fine tickets,” the official adds.

He says that the salary of traffic wardens is not sufficient. “Their salary must be increased,” he suggests. The official also discloses that in Rawalpindi there are 100 sanctioned posts of STWs while only 31 are working. The depressed traffic wardens are quitting, as so far 700 traffic wardens have left their job. “Whenever anyone of us finds any job, we will leave,” says a traffic warden.

Published in Dawn, October 19th, 2014