City of Late Ravi River

[Salman]

Lahore : If you haven’t already lost faith in Pakistan, come to Lahore, capital of the nation’s most populous province and the centre of culture, civilisation and public wellbeing. If you are driving into Lahore on the M-1 from Islamabad, hang a left at Babu Sabu Exit and you will hit Bund Road (hopefully this name did not catch the PTA’s wild imagination). Make a left towards the east and start travelling on the fabled Ring Road which has U-turns in the “fast” right-hand lane, Allah be praised! Although, ever since Lahore came into murky view, you are already engulfed in smoke, smog, soot and another ‘“S” word that cannot be mentioned, with some prehistoric factories belching out smoke, fire and toxic gases into the polluted atmosphere through long-broken and absent tin roofs. Nothing-and really nothing – can prepare you for the environmental degradation that marks this Ring Road till you escape into the realms of dreamy Defence where the rich and the infamous reside.

It is a surreal world. Visibility is very limited. There are houses rising like dilapidated war-shattered derelicts, people move about like ghosts, every living thing is covered with soot and dust, the bushes, if any, drooping in the last throes of death, an abandoned park (built by the city government but out of bounds for commoners) and factories. Factories after factories, filthy, dirty, rundown – belching out life-sucking gases and smoke into the haze of pollution that envelops everything. This is a world of ghouls and monsters, it seems, yet people like you and me live here and are dying here.

On the left of the glamorous Ring Road lies the largest landfill you can ever imagine. It spreads as far as you can peer in this gloomy area and it now rises higher than the road you are travelling on. Here, Lahore’s solid waste is dumped daily and here it lies. In hot summers, one hears it sometimes erupts into fire as gases play havoc inside its murky depths. Other times, it just sits there growing larger by the day. When it rains, the water seeps through the muck and creates another slimy world. God knows what crawls here. There is no plan in sight to remove or burn it, or whatever they do to solid waste dumps. It is someone else’s problems. One lot has dumped religiously all that can be collected; another lot looks at it and walks on. Yes, there is an Environmental Authority whose members and officials should be interred in the landfill and left there.

Welcome to Mehmood Booti, which is what Dante must have had in mind when he wrote The Inferno. This is indeed hell on earth and is one of three designated landfill sites. The other two are at Baghrian and Saggian Bridge, and pity the folks who live in and around these hellholes. In fact, only Mehmood Booti enjoys the status of an official landfill site. The other two are simply dumping grounds. From the state Booti is in, one can only imagine what is happening there – or can one actually imagine? Booti has no scientific waste-disposal system, even though it’s been around. About 7,000 and more tonnes of solid waste are generated daily in Lahore. The Lahore Cantonment Board, Model Town Society and DHA add an additional 1,000 tonnes daily, give or take a few hundred tones, which is left in drains or scattered on the streets since the CDGL (City and District Government of Lahore) doesn’t have the capacity to pick it up. That’s about 8,000 tonnes.

A 2002 report on the EPA’s website states that this amount is calculated “visually,” and not by any scientific method, so it’s anybody’s guess what the real figures may be. Waste is collected and dumped by the municipalities or by contractors hired by them. None of the three sites have any liners to prevent chemicals and toxic materials from seeping into the soil and the city’s natural water reservoirs. An EPA report without a date (maybe 2001 or 2002) declares that scientific landfills in four cities will be built within one year at a cost of Rs100 million. A newspaper article of 2008 reveals that nothing whatsoever has been done. Two proposed landfill sites on Ferozepur Road have run into a dead end. The toll in human wellbeing can be assessed by an undated report that revealed the presence of respiratory diseases amongst every third person living near the landfill sites.

Every conceivable iron and steel works claptrap factory lies right in the middle of areas where people live. Malik, Butt, Warraich, Bismillah, Yazdani, Sharif, Chaudhry are some of the names that pop out. They are probably minting money, but their degradation of the environment is allowed unchecked. One look at any of these state-of-the-art facilities and you will know that no one has ever been here to close them down. Most likely, the environment regulators are merely on payrolls, as is mostly the case here.

The PAK EPA, or (if you must know what that mumbo jumbo means) Pakistan Environmental Protection Agency, is the last to do anything about environment. God knows when it was born, but to-date it has done zilch and nothing that deserves mention. If anything, it has grossly malfunctioned and abandoned the very mission for which it was created. With no ministry of environment in existence, thanks to the government’s brilliant leap into the next age, the EPA is doomed anyway. They should close it down and throw away the key.

While there is no will to work, bureaucracy has seen to it that to further accelerate the inefficiency, more departments, ordinances and acts are either added or changed. EPCO, EPC, HP&EP, EPA Punjab, NEQS, EPD, PEPO – the ridiculous list goes on and on. Collectively they do nothing. One could use any number of words to eloquently describe their performance but PTA is watching, so hush. The “achievements” of the EPD Punjab are not listed. What a surprise. However, they installed solar lights at Racecourse Road and Electronic Display Boards at Jail Road, Qaddafi Stadium and Lower Mall. These were traffic hazards, ran into problems and are now an eyesore, as the structures stand like giants without legs. There are at least 24 officials heading the EPD/EPA once led by Sardar Khosa. There are Secretaries galore, Assistant Secretaries, Director Generals and Directors, but what they do is abundantly clear by what we see around us. God alone knows what things are like in other parts of Punjab and, for that matter, other provinces and cities. The rural areas luckily do not figure on anyone’s books.

A map of Lahore District shows that at least 277 factories dump their effluents, sewage, chemicals, and what have you, into the wretched Ravi, whose only fault is that it once meandered happily in these parts. The river is now poisoned beyond repair. Like the solid-waste business, this too has fallen by the wayside. There is little updated data available.

It is believed that of the 6,600 industries in Punjab alone, only 41 have water-treatment plants. The rest are not burdened or bothered by any authority. Samples of water collected from the Ravi in 2009-2010 revealed a high level of toxicity and materials that are life-threatening. At every level, these water samples fall way below accepted criteria of organisations like the WHO. All the municipal and industrial effluents fall into the Ravi. The fish are long dead, as are all forms of life that thrive in clean water. This city of culture has one great river and it has murdered it. Who is responsible? I guess we all are. Expecting the local government and its callous officials to actually move their butts (oops, sorry PTA) is being foolish. No heads will ever roll here. People now say that this is so because all officials actually have square heads.