The Sindh province still faces enormous socio-economic challenges. However, I want to single out five chronic socioeconomic issues which need an immediate attention of the rulers to uplift the life and living standards of the people in the province. These include: Sindh province’s land, health, poverty, education and law and order situation.
Sindh province’s land is facing serious problem of water logging and salinity and also acute shortage of water to irrigate the fertile and rich land in more than fifty percent area of the province. The past successive regimes did nothing to align, improve and upgrade the watercourses, water channels, canals, barrages and rivers.
Shockingly, all these are being polluted with the industrial and urban waste. Numerous trees along with the banks of canals and barrages are being ruthlessly chopped and not even a single new sapling is planted along the canals, water channels, water courses, roads and highways. It is totally different that the official record of the concerned departments shows that every years millions of sapling have been planted there.
If the present government sincerely improves and upgrades the watercourses, channels, canals and rivers, I am confident that then even a single drop of water will not go waste and moreover, those areas which are in the grip of paucity of water, both for drinking and irrigation purposes, would emerge as the “food and fruit basket” of the country.
The government must direct the concerned departments to use the public sector money uprightly and judiciously in the development and up-gradation of canals and watercourse instead of misappropriating and embezzling.
Epidemic and preventable diseases have devastated the province. There are hardly any hospitals or doctors at Taluka and district level.
Even if there are some, they are deprived of all resources including skilled and unskilled manpower, professionals such as doctors and paramedical staff, medicines, logistics, and material resources. The facts and figures are alarming about the death toll due to preventable diseases.
Millions of Sindhis live in grinding poverty. What’s the government doing to bring prosperity to the people and is it working? Can the gap between the rich and the poor be bridged?
Hundreds of schools and colleges, which were shut during the past successive regimes, are still shut. Pitiably, many more schools don’t even have basic facilities and the required number of teachers.
There is neither law nor order in the province. If anybody is safe and secure, it is either police itself or the elected representatives called “MPAs and MNAs”, or those people who have come to settle in Sindh.
The Sindhi intelligentsia has started thinking on this question: Sindhis suffer during the democratic dispensation in the country. If democracy is the best revenge, who or from whom this revenge is being exacted?
HASHIM ABRO
Islamabad