Re: Poor of Tharparker-Broken promises by Shaukat Aziz and Arbab Rahim
http://www.dawn.com/2006/03/27/ebr1.htm
PM’s forgotten promise, CM’s abandoned homeland
By Naween A. Mangi
YOU can feel the anguish of Thar even before you get there. It’s early in the month of March and throughout the districts of Badin, Mirpurkhas and Umerkot, caravans of desperate, migrating Tharis are suffering through their hard seasonal journey. Some take a break under a shadeless tree, their heads slumped into their hands. Others struggle to fetch pots full of water to get through the afternoon heat.
Yet others shun rest, to press on with their long travel, gently urging their exhausted animals to stay on the move. All share a common aim: getting themselves and their livestock to one of the irrigated parts of Sindh. It’s their only hope of getting through the drought alive.
When it comes upon you soon after crossing the historic Naukot Fort, the Thar desert is achingly captivating in all its unspoiled, rugged beauty. The soft sand of the western region of the district gives way to the rockier, hilly dunes of the central area and the flatter plains of the north shift gradually into the redder ground and stony mountain range of the south eastern zone. Each expanse unique in its exquisiteness, yet each is tied together with the same extreme despair of its dwellers.
The magnificence of the landscape is overpowering. In the morning light, the delicate Rohero tree brings the barren desert to life with its fiery orange blast of a blossom. In the heat of the afternoon, a glimmering peacock stands watch on a great red stone in the historic Nagarparkar.
Late at night, in a moonlight-drenched desert, a soundless Indian scoop owl swoops down in hunt of prey. The small, pale desert fox darts out from behind the bushes. And deep within its majesty, the desert holds a million secrets of an anguished, unending struggle for survival.
This is the district of Tharparkar in the south eastern arid zone of Sindh. The desert, spread over 19,000 square kilometers, is home to about a million people, more than 95 per cent of whom live in the 2,400 villages in rural Thar.
The district had a majority Hindu population until the early sixties and is still home to a large percentage of the community. The poorest of the scheduled castes—the Menghwar, the Kolhis and the Bheel— suffer the most in times of drought while poor segments of the Muslim population, primarily the Parah and the Khaskheli also fall victim to the paucity of rain.
Many of the Menghwar work on carpet and shawl weaving while the Bheel usually migrate to the irrigated parts of the province in search of seasonal labour and most of the Kolhis engage in herding and labour.
For almost two-thirds of the population, Tharparkar’s is an economy based on casual labour and credit, which provide 78 per cent and 69 per cent of total income, according to a Household Economy Assessment Report published by Thardeep Rural Development Programme, an NGO with extensive operations throughout Thar.
In comparison, agriculture and livestock provide just eight to 25 per cent of total income. The district also has some of the worst socio-economic indicators. Just one per cent of the rural population has access to safe drinking water, barely four per cent have electricity in their homes and only 5.3 per cent of the female population is literate, according to data from the UN’s World Food Programme.
In its 2003 report on Food Insecurity in Rural Pakistan, the UN WFP ranks Tharparkar as the most food insecure district in all of rural Pakistan followed by Dera Bugti and Waziristan. Of the 38 districts ranked as extremely insecure, the worst category, Thar is at number one and is the only district in Sindh to make that list.
Thar is also the district with the most extreme deficiency of cereals and crop-based foods relative to per capita per day consumption. It is the poorest district in rural Sindh with a caloric poverty rate of 72.4 per cent, far above the second poorest district of Umerkot where 46.2 per cent live in poverty.
Thar is also among the top two poorest districts in rural Pakistan alongside Dera Bugti where 73 per cent of the population live below the poverty line. Tharparkar has one of the lowest levels of human development of all the districts in the country with a human development index score of 0.343, lower than that of Ethiopia and Malawi.
Empty promises: It is also the constituency from which Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz was given a route to the Parliament and the Prime Minister’s house. And it is the homeland of Sindh Chief Minister Arbab Rahim Khan.
Yet, there’s scarcely a villager in Thar who can name the Prime Minister or President of Pakistan. The few that remember Aziz from his mock election are bitterly disappointed in the empty promises he made of converting Thar into a second Paris. “He ran away and forgot all about us,” says one old villager who doesn’t share his name in fear. Many can name Chief Minister Rahim. Their resounding sentiments about him: “He has given us nothing,” says a young man from a poor village of labourers. “But he did give us a doubling in the price of sugar.” Says another young girl: “If I had it my way, I would throw him out of Thar. That’s how good he’s been to us.”
The Sindh budget documents for 2005-06 show an allocation for the Tharparkar district government at Rs1.092 billion, up from Rs1.013 billion in 2004-05 and the lowest allocation among all 23 districts in Sindh.
In late 2004, after his election, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz announced a Rs1.5 billion special package for Thar. This included allocations of Rs475 million for water supply, Rs473 million for irrigation, Rs340 million for rural electrification and Rs133 million for industry. Additionally Rs130 million was allocated for health projects, Rs13 million for a drainage scheme and Rs10 million for education. A look at the detailed breakup makes it clear, however, that ground realities have not been taken into careful consideration.
The short- term implementation programme for the package shows that the allocation for water projects is to be used for two water supply pipelines. No allocations have been made for hand pumps or wells, investments that can truly revolutionize life for villagers. A hand pump costs Rs25,000 on average while a dig well costs Rs100,000 and a tube well can be installed for Rs3 million. These simple investments have been proven to change the way people in this district live.
Then, one of the most painful realities in the desert of Thar is the lack of access to sanitary facilities. This is especially a problem for women since almost all village households are without toilets. But the Thar Package includes no allocations for these simple, inexpensive investments that can bring privacy, sanitation and dignity to the lives of women.
Then is the matter of health. Allocations have been made for the provision of equipment for Taluka Hospitals and ambulances. That’s all very well but it makes little sense to strengthen the major hospitals when the basic health units in remote rural areas remain decrepit and crumbling without the most basic equipment, staff or services. Moreover, there are only four women doctors in the district and not a single gynecologist but this has been overlooked as well.
Allocations for education are equally myopic. Vocational education is to be introduced, and an artisans’ workshop and convention centre set up in Mithi along with an artisan’s residential colony. All this, when ghost schools that exist only on paper are littered throughout the district, thousands of children are unable to name a single alphabet and schools that do function remain without buildings, furniture, books or drinking water for students.
Migration for survival: While these ambitious packages are worked out in big cities, the Tharis under discussion are struggling to survive. In March, seasonal migration is at its peak as livestock farmers and farm workers walk for days and nights to reach farms in Umerkot, Mirpur Khas, Badin, Sanghar, and Nawabshah.
Over half the population is said to migrate each year and the problem has intensified over the last two decades as the intensity of rainfall has fallen resulting in less farmed land and years of drought. In 2004, the drought resulted in total crop failure and the only coping mechanisms were to reduce food consumption, take on more debt, sell more livestock and increase casual labour. Unless they migrate, the farmer’s livestock begins to starve since the drought has depleted the land of any fodder.
The migrants return in July only if it brings substantive rains which will help produce millet and guar, the two major crops of the desert. Farming at home is their greatest pleasure and they will spend their months outside Thar tracking the clouds in the hope of a way home. The rains will also bring fodder for the animals whose milk and butter are the mainstay of survival for most.
The Chief Minister recently called a meeting in Karachi to discuss the problem of seasonal migration that takes the people of Thar from their land every year to the irrigated parts of Sindh in search of labour on agricultural lands. Whatever was discussed during that meeting didn’t amount to much because early in March, the landscape of Thar looks like the great migration in progress.
All day and late into the night, through every Taluka of the district, villagers are on the move. Men in tattered clothes, a stick from the Babbar tree hoisted onto their shoulders, one end holding an old oil canister full of water, the other a tiny bundle of clothes shuffle along the dark roads, herds of goats, sheep, cows and camels trundling alongside.
Pirano, an old man from Nagarparkar has reached Mithi after three days and nights of travel. It will take him four more to get to a village in an irrigated zone where he will labour on the wheat harvest and use the few rupees he makes to buy fodder for his animals.
“My animals are dying, I have no choice but to leave home,” he says. Just behind him, a caravan of the Bheel community has been on the road for seven days and nights and will walk for five more, deposit their livestock at a landlord’s farm and then walk the distance back to escort their wives and children. Jeevo, a young man who looks angry but helpless says his village of Sonyath is entirely deserted, everyone having left for the irrigated lands.
A third group in the endless travel is from Nagarparkar and must travel 400 kilometers to reach their destination. “We die every step of the way there but go we must,” says the old man leading the group. “We get no wages working the land where we’re going but they give us a share of the crop so we survive on that.”
The irony is abjectly despondent. The only source that feeds these people is dying of starvation. Dead goats, even camels are not uncommon sights along the roadside. In one caravan, a donkey simply stops walking, his skeletal hind legs collapsing into each other.
The migration doesn’t always work out. Take Praghu Lal, now 28, who spent ten years of his childhood and teenage years in bonded labour to a landowner in Umerkot. When he was just ten, his entire extended family, migrated in search of agriculture labour since the persistent drought in Thar had left them with no other option. There, Praghu grew up labouring on rice, wheat, cotton and red chilli fields earning Rs 15 for an 18-hour work day. “We starved our way through those years,” he says.
Praying for rain: Yet, despite their dire circumstances, somehow the people of Thar smile through their tribulations. At a Kolhi village just outside the town of Mithi, night has fallen and in the pitch dark of the desert, a few of the 15 families left in the village of 150 households gather together and sit under a night sky studded with clusters of stars.
These people own no livestock and survive gathering and selling firewood which makes them Rs50 a day on good days. Their staple diet is wheat flour and red chillies. Their naked children with wild matted hair show every sign of malnutrition. They grapple every day with the scarcity of water, subsist on what they can find, have never known electricity or healthcare or schools.
Yet they keep their mud plastered huts clean. And take pride in how their trademark conical roofs thatched with the long thin reeds of a desert scrub are made to keep them cool. They laugh, even while relating tales of the innumerable cobras and Sindh rattlers that emerge in the dead of the night to kill.
Their homeland is remarkably, unbelievably rough, unkind and inhospitable terrain. Yet their attachment to it is the stuff of legends. They barely survive. But they stay and they sing about their desert, its agonies, its ecstasies. And through it all, they pray that rain will come.
