Driving back home late night from work a couple of nights earlier, I could not help but notice that Lahore truly has some magnificent infrastructure. An abundance of flyovers, underpasses, pedestrian bridges, attractive monuments, the very green canal road and the Ring Road, which would probably rank amongst one of the best roads in the country if not the region. A city of Lahore’s stature and dense population does require decongestion infrastructure and has rightly been sewed through the city’s landscape in order to facilitate comfortable travelling across the city and a fluent traffic control system. However, my contention in this particular regard is that in a third world country, such as Pakistan, does prioritising costly aesthetics over the basic necessities as required by the rural masses make any sense.
In trying to analyse the same, rather than providing a general analysis, I will use a couple of existent examples in order to explain the status quo. Thus, it is important to note that my family mainly resides in tehsil Chishtian of the Bahawalnagar District located in the south of Punjab. It is a highly underdeveloped region of Pakistan, although the area is marvelled for its highly fertile and productive agricultural lands located along the Sutlej. Actually, underdeveloped is an understatement in relation to the rural peripheries of Chishtian.
An example of the same is the Chishtian – Megheran road. A road of a few kilometres that connects Chishtian city to a minimum of 3-4 union councils and the only way to the city, markets, decent schools, basic healthcare facilities, mills, businesses and the outside world for several villages. This so called road of sand, rubble and mud has been constructed once since the inception of the country and has not resembled a proper road for most of the duration. Due to the sandy terrain of the area, hazes of sand are disbursed in to the air every time a vehicle passes through, leaving the pedestrians in heaps of dust, their clothes ruined, heads and mouths filled with sand. Pedestrians include inter-alia school going children, patients looking for treatment in the city, farmers transporting their produce, shepherds walking their cattle and pretty much everyone in a rural setting barring a few well endowed. God forbid it rains along the road, it is like adding injury to insult, forming quagmires of mud and puddles bringing life along the Chishtian-Megheran road to a grinding halt. Hundreds of children unable to attend school, many who require medical aid expire enroute, unable to reach the hospital in time, farmers unable to tend to their crops, bearing countless losses. The inapt condition of such a busy road is not just an inconvenience but also raises many health concerns for the residents of the area. This without a doubt is one of the prominent reasons owing to which the locals have seen a rise in victims of various breathing and stomach related diseases stemming from polluted/unhygienic surroundings.
Secondly, a boat bridge constructed over the Sutlej River, anywhere in between Islam headworks, Hasilpur and Bhukkan Bridge, Bahawalnagar could connect tehsil Chishtian with tehsil Vihari and would probably cost approximately PKR. 10 – 15 million. However, due to the non-existence of one, travellers from both the tehsils have to travel an excessive 100 – 120 kilometres just to reach the other side of the Sutlej. The construction of such a bridge would effectively reduce the travelling distance by more than 100 kilometres, which would in turn greatly decrease the travelling and transport costs and lessen the traffic burden on the Bahawalpur-Bahawalnagar road. It would also raise the standards of living of the two districts as the boat bridge would encourage an increased trade and movement of workers / goods without any extra financial encumbrances. The construction of such a bridge would also open the door to many new and varying options in terms of hospitals, schools, colleges, universities, mills and markets for both tehsils, promoting competition, preventing hegemony of the sugar mafia and other monopolistic entities, which needless to say would have a positive impact on the quality of the goods produced and services provisioned in these tehsils. Competitive pricing would help keep at bay the soaring inflation rates and would facilitate growth of the largely prevalent farmer/agriculturist community in particular and its effects on poverty alleviation and the development of the District itself are somewhat self-explanatory.
Now, having highlighted a prominent two of an uncountable number of infrastructural deficiencies in one tehsil, a comparison can be drawn with urban projects, actually just one is enough, namely, the Kalma Flyover project in Lahore. The contractors for the project, NLC, on their website quote that the project was completed in a record 135 days in the midst of heavy traffic costing about PKR. 1.3 billion. In my humble opinion, the rationale behind the Kalma Flyover project is to ensure fluidity of traffic, basically to save about ten minutes of people travelling on the Ferozepur road, the bulk of which already own or travel by air-conditioned transport, having hundreds of other new age, glistening carpeted roads and routes to choose from. The project is one which satisfies no extraordinary purpose, merely a cosmetic one, absolutely none which is any superior, of more importance, of more necessity or urgency than the purpose that could be served through construction of the above two infrastructure requirements in Bahawalnagar.
Therefore, you do the math; you decide what the need of the hour is. Both the abovementioned projects could be completed perhaps in less than half the cost of the Kalma Flyover; probably in lesser time and unlike the Kalma Flyover or hundreds of other projects being rushed through in the urban areas and metropolitans, the effects of both could be seen far and wide, changing, protecting, revamping and saving lives. The Federal and Punjab Government and their shortcomings have recently been vastly propagated but very rarely have they been criticised for a lack of emphasis on infrastructure. However, in reality sightless precedence has been given to urban over rural, aesthetics over necessity and glitter over sand. Although a utopian thought that constructing a road and a bridge could alleviate all of the problems of the rural masses but a little crawl towards antecedence, and the sand could sparkle as much as the glitter.
