ISLAMABAD, March 4: The ministry of environment on Tuesday launched the International Year of Sanitation 2008, blissfully ignorant of the environmental disasters spread all around.

If they had cared to take a walk around the Holiday Inn hotel where the ceremony took place, it would have been found that Islamabad is no more ‘the beautiful.’

Right across the street from the hotel, in Eram Market, heaps of garbage makes an ugly sight almost everyday. Farther down, under a jumble of rusted metal roofs, that make up the slums, people are deprived of all basic necessities including water and sanitation.

Speaking at the ceremony, secretary ministry of environment Ejaz Ahmed Qureshi said the mean estimated annual cost of environmental and natural resource damage on account of improper water supply, sanitation and hygiene conditions in Pakistan was Rs112 billion which was over 1.8 per cent of the GDP.

“For every dollar spent towards improving sanitation and hygiene, between $3 and $34 is saved in health, education and social and economic development. Hence, investment in sanitation is an investment for the betterment of communities and the children,” he observed.

Despite the ministries’ tall claims of trying to make the difference, the residents of Islamabad breathe a toxic mix of construction dust, fumes kicked from vans and buses and under factory emissions. Thick smog, which according to Civil Aviation Authority is dangerously causing visibility problems, sits over the city. “It’s similar to Lahore and Karachi where the sun sets probably 20 to 30 minutes before it reaches the horizon.” Someone at the launch rightly put it, “Islamabad used to be a clean city before its residents started living here.”

Thanks to the lack of foresight of the ministry and other authorities concerned, historical monuments, forest coverage, air quality, almost everything seems to be suffering. Even the new 7th Avenue has been constructed without considering severe environmental hazards.

“If the ministry has failed to even keep Islamabad - city of the so-called educated, bureaucrats, ministers and the president - clean, it can be left to one’s imagination of how poor environmental conditions are in other parts of the country.

The launch kicked off with the resolve of making sanitation everyone’s business and with the commitment of halving the proportion of people without sustainable access to sanitation by 2015 as stated in the Millennium Development Goals.

The event highlighted that Pakistan was the most urbanised country in South Asia, with 58 million people living in cities. This number was increasing at 3.3 per cent, nearly three times faster than rural areas and the country would become predominantly urban by 2030 exerting immense pressures on urban infrastructure especially the environment.

Access to sanitation was one of the most overlooked and undeserved human needs in the country and it was nothing less than a fundamental issue of human dignity and human rights. More than 91 million people in Pakistan lack access to sanitation.

While the ministry, which under IYS country plan expects to reach about 20 per cent of the population with hygiene messages, should most certainly start from Islamabad whose residents also need to be educated that keeping the streets clean is not the sole responsibility of the CDA or the ministry.

Echoing along similar lines, Unicef’s chief of water, environment and sanitation, Andrew Parker in his presentation said sanitation would help eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, help achieve universal primary education and promote gender equality and empower women.

“It will also help reduce child mortality. Pakistan is still one of the few countries left with polio and poor sanitation does not help. Sanitation will have better impact on maternal health,” Mr Parker said.