After the imposition of Section 144, a ban on washing cars left thousands of daily wagers making ends meet through the car wash business jobless. The government’s decision may prove to be hazardous for workers at service stations as most of them were dependent on this profession. It has been witnessed that unemployment has the tendency to force the unemployed to do illegal activities which may reflect badly on the society’s well being.
Earlier the City District Government Lahore (CDGL) shut most of the service stations meant for washing vehicles across the city in order to curb the dengue outbreak by checking the growth of dengue mosquitoes in stagnant water. Service station owners blamed the Punjab government for their massive losses. They said that they were taking care of hygiene at the pumps and were not allowing water to accumulate in puddles which allowed the growth of dengue mosquitoes. The government should have asked them to take precautionary measures rather than sealing their stations, they added.
It has been estimated that there are hundreds of service stations across the city in which there are thousands of daily wagers.
A worker at the Nawab Service Station said that he would not be able to find any other job as he was illiterate. He said that hunger would prevail in his household as he was the sole bread-winner. He pleaded that the government should find an alternative source of income for the poor workers at the service stations. The owner of Nawab Service Station said that his work was already been hampered by load shedding and the implementation of section 144 had added to his woes.
The decision may prove to be flawed owing to inflation and its consequence, unemployment. Citizens said that closing everything down was not a sign of good governance as they would prefer to take preventive measures rather than putting a full stop to their lives. A citizen Moazzam said that people who worked at service stations could not feed themselves if they did not work and now the question arose as to how they would subsist without any source of income.
The spokesman of the Punjab government, Pervez Rasheed said that the government’s highest priority was to save the lives of people and the decision of closing everything down was taken to cope with the growing epidemic. He said that the government has found larva samples of dengue mosquitoes from these service stations therefore the government decided to take the extreme step. While addressing the issues that the service station workers had to face, he said that the decision was taken for the common benefit of people and it was the obligation of the service station owners to support the poor workers in this time of crisis. He said someone had to bear losses in order to control the epidemic.
A worker at the Lasani Service Station said that monsoon was their peak season as vehicles get dirty in these days due to the routine torrential outpour in the city. He said one could still observe massive waste material and stagnant water on the roads which needed to be taken care of. He speculated that the people left unemployed might get involved in various criminal activities as it would be their last resort to make ends meet. An alarmingly increasing unemployment could wreak havoc on the domestic economy of the country, he added.
