khAdim duRRani Quettawaal
From Jang online edition (Quetta News) of Thursday, May 14, 2009, Jamadi-ul-Awwal 18, 1430 A.H
In the last two decades things have changed dramatically in Quetta valley and the city has become a real ‘problemistan‘ now. At present, law and order is the main issue that is affecting everyone in Pakistan, Quetta being not an exception to it: daylight robberies and muggings at gun point, kidnappings for ransom and target killings are only a few examples! It would be a futile exercise to discuss time and again the reasons behind such a dismal state of affairs because we all know that bad governance and corruption are the main factors that prevent us from living a decent life – something that we are beginning to admit openly but we are still not ready to do something about it!
Anyhow, what stunned me today was the above news item that appeared in the Urdu daily Jang online’s Quetta city news section whereby it has been reported that a woman from Quetta suburb (Marri Abad) gave birth to a child in a ‘rickshaw’ while desperately trying to get to the Civil Hospital! Obviously and truly the bad traffic was blamed for the embarrassingly unpleasant incident that the poor woman and her accompanying relative(s) experienced.
One can only sympathize with her ordeal and pray for other women never to be in a similar situation. As far as the above woman is concerned in a way her negative experience had a positive outcome and that is a new life was born which is in quite contrast to those situations whereby ill and injured people while trying to get to the hospitals, succumb to their illnesses/injuries because of badly managed traffic or lack of transporting facilities .
In 2005, in an attempt to address the traffic issue I designed a draft project on how to improve traffic in Quetta. But due to lack of funding it has not been launched to this date. Apparently the NGOs are involved in various development projects but a few of them are part of the national NGO mafia netweork; they are busy spending public funds on their personal projects, enriching themselves and their families or else they run meaningless projects simply to grab more money!
I think giving suggestions as to what should we do to help ease our daily sufferings is not going to help us either – as we are a nation with plenty of suggestions but sans actions; I would simply urge all the forces for social change to continue working for democracy, social justice and rule of law. Perhaps one day we will implement and reinforce laws that were once enacted for our civic betterment.
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