time and severity of the catastrophe.
She said that, most unfortunately, the department had not learnt a lesson from the 2010 countrywide floods when the nation was caught absolutely off-guard and large swathes of land were deluged by flood waters which took over two years to be rid off.
Farhat Parveen of NOW Communities said that despite the fact that the city had a number of big hospitals none were geared to coping with the kind of crisis the city just faced. K-Electric, she said, had been most apathetic to the whole crisis. There, she said, was no planning of the civic services and infrastructure and the fact that the city’s population was increasing by 10 million annually because of “lopsided national planning” and major needs were constantly being ignored.
When a questioner pointed out that a lot many of the victims were actually drug addicts who had died of their own carelessness, Karamat Ali, Director, Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (Piler) said that even if that argument were to be taken, it must not be forgotten that the drugees were as much a responsibility of the government.
Why were they addicts, in the first place, he queried, and then answered his own question by saying that it was because of the apathetic policies and planning of the government which bred unmitigated poverty and socio-economic inequality forcing many into such activities to seek a respite from their problems by living in a make-believe world.
Addicts, he said, were as much a creation of our rulers’ apathy. Just to let them die, he said, was certainly no way out of the problem. It was downright, inhuman, he said. All human life, he said, was equally precious.
He said that even though they were wholly and solely the government’s responsibility, there were no homes, no shelter for senior citizens and often, they were left to fend for themselves amid a hostile world in the dying stages of their lives.