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  #311  
Old Sunday, November 10, 2013
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10.11.2013
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Lack of computer literacy among teachers is a reality. A multilateral initiative takes off in Pakistan to do the needful
By Shahzada Irfan Ahmed


With over 30 million Internet users and more than half of the Pakistani population covered by cellular networks and mobile phone connectivity, lack of Information Communications Technology (ICT) literacy amongst and school students and teachers is still a harsh reality.

A primary indicator of the state of computer literacy amongst school teachers in Pakistan is the condition of schools and the availability of learning tools, condition of computer labs and the skills of those operating them. This brings one to the issues of availability of both electricity and Internet connectivity. The discussion can further be divided between urban and rural or private and public sector schoolteachers.

Private sector schools in urban settings in Pakistan have more ICT literate schoolteachers and certain schools have integrated personal computing and Internet learning into the school learning. More expensive private sector educators have integrated smart learning and robotics introduction for students and thus the ICT literacy skills of teachers have also been upgraded.

Since personal and mobile computing tools like personal computers, laptops, smart phones and tablets are widely available at affordable prices in cities and larger towns, schoolteachers may have access to these devices both at their schools and at homes.

However, the situation in public sector schools is a bit different. In urban areas, they may have computer labs and Internet connectivity but there is no credible data on the usage rate and skill levels of computer literacy of both schoolchildren and schoolteachers. The rural area public schools on the other hand may have a lesser probability of receiving both electricity and Internet connectivity. Besides, availability of computer hardware labs and the security of the equipment may remain a very big challenge for them.

The above-stated situation calls for proper integration of ICT in early education and equipping teachers with modern pedagogical skills. The need for benefiting from the credible information available on the Internet was not as pressing as it is in the competitive world of today.

Educationists agree on the point that making students learn by rot and stick to one textbook, are outdated techniques of learning. They propose education model that promotes critical thinking, inquisitiveness and ability to find solutions by accessing multiple sources of information. What better source than Internet can one have to develop these skills?

The answer obviously is: none. The importance of ICT in improving quality of education can be gauged from the fact that United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) have signed a Letter of Intent (LOI) with Intel Pakistan to enable social change and build human capital in underserved communities in Pakistan through digital literacy and education interventions. Under the terms of this LOI, Unesco Islamabad will utilise Intel education content for pilot e-learning material used in schools; conduct pilot professional development courses for teachers which would be based on Intel Teach Program and so on.

Though this is not first such programme launched in Pakistan, it is unique in a sense that organisations like Unesco and Intel — a global leader in ICT systems — are partners in it. So what are these organisations aiming to achieve?

The answer comes from Intel Pakistan Country Manager Naveed Siraj. He tells TNS they want to improve public access to education and raise literacy levels through the innovative use of technology. He says Intel Teach Program offers K-12 (grade 1 to grade 12) teachers a curriculum designed specifically for their needs. Teachers learn how, when, and where to incorporate technology tools and resources into their teaching.

The history of Intel Teach Program in Pakistan dates back to 2001 when 350 teachers were trained in Punjab in a pilot project. To date, Intel has trained 330,000 teachers in ICT skills and most of them are from the public sector. The trainings, he says, are purely for teachers’ professional development and are done in collaboration with partners such as the Ministry of Education or provincial education departments.

He stresses the importance of ICT integration in education system, saying it can solve perennial issues right away. For example, online content delivery can rid people of issues related to late publishing and delivery of textbooks in different parts of the country. “Just imagine how digital textbooks could be sent anywhere in a split second and how easy it would to be make amendments if needed,” he adds.

ICT sector expert and global internet governance adviser, Fouad Bajwa, appreciates the initiative and calls for a National Education Policy to advise stakeholders. The policy, he says, should instruct provinces to incorporate ICT literacy in all public sector schools at any cost? In the private sector, ICT literacy is a matter of widespread common practice whereas within the public sector schools, ICT literacy has to be promoted by initiatives taken purely by the government or through Public Private Partnerships (PPPs).

This PPP model is followed by Intel Pakistan which provides trainers for schools free of cost, says Naveed. The content is also designed by Intel according to the modern day needs. It enables teachers to prepare lessons using ICT and Internet and interact with students through online tools. Imparting of these skills is crucial at this point as students learn to form online peer groups and develop collective study habits.

However, Fouad wants policymakers to be very specific and calls for a single course of action all over the country. His point is that the students should know how to operate personal computers, laptops and smart phones for that matter. He says teachers should be able to connect and browse the Internet, write emails, use Voip based services like skype and social media networking tools like facebook. They should be able to browse educational resources like open access knowledge and information or simply wikipedia and be able to operate office productivity programmes. If these skills are known to them, they can impart them to their students as well, he adds.

A positive development in this context is that Unesco Pakistan has decided to share Intel’s Easy Steps course on its website as well. The course offers content on how to create a simple website, conduct an Internet search, create a basic skype account, create an address book, create an email account, download files from the Internet, create a logo, how to use the help guide, manage your files and folders, create a presentation, create a resume, process digital images, use an external storage device, use mobile phone as a modem, search or surf the Internet, send an E-card, use a printer, use skype to make calls and share documents, use a scanner or use a webcam and perform other similar tasks.
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Old Sunday, November 10, 2013
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10.11.2013
Yet to learn our lesson
A girl school in Fort Abbas, District Bahawalnagar, is a telltale of our poor
education policies
By Rasheed Ali


No headmistress for over a year, only one teacher for ninth and tenth classes, no clerical staff at all, no science laboratory or apparatus for science subjects practical examination preparation, and no clean drinking water facility: this is Government Girls High School, Chak No 330/HR, Marot, Tehsil Fort Abbas, District Bahawalnagar.

Nyla Rasheed, the teacher in-charge at the school, has a long list of complaints to relate if you ask her about the on-ground situation. The school caters for girl students coming from at least seven nearby villages, situated at the brink of Cholistan desert. But the educational facility is facing so many problems for long that it has almost failed to retain its students, says Ms Nyla.

“During the last one year, we invited the community leaders, made all-out efforts and admitted almost 20 students to ninth class,” says Nyla, but regrets that almost half of them left the school due to various reasons including non-availability of science teachers and laboratory facility.

Only six teachers are serving at the high school currently and there is no math teacher at all for the secondary section. “In the absence of a headmistress, I have to work as the head teacher and manage the school affairs. And as there is not a single clerk in the school, I have to dispose of all clerical tasks after the school time, though I feel really exhausted after taking eight periods daily,” complains the young teacher.

This school must have much more number of students compared with its current strength of about 300. But sometimes parents and mostly students themselves prefer going to the Girls High School, Marot — the biggest town in the area, situated about 13 kilometres away — due to non-availability of science teachers in the Chak No 330/HR high school.

Amna Ishtiaq, a dropout, endorses Ms Nyla Rasheed’s assertions. She had to leave her education after she failed her eighth class examination.

“I never liked mathematics as a subject,” says Amna. “I always found it difficult to grasp this subject fully even when a teacher was available in lower classes,” she adds. “And in 8th class, unluckily we did not have teachers to teach us mathematics and English subjects, so I failed my exam,” explains Amna sadly.

“My father had already told me that whenever I will fail my exam, he will withdraw me from school and marry me off. Now, I don’t go to school though I want to, and get education at least to college level.” And thus Amna met the fate of hundreds of thousands of girls of her kind.

However, Bahawalnagar District Education Officer (DEO) Iqbal Ahmad offers a remedy to avoid such situations in the future.

Admitting that a number of schools, especially girl schools, in the entire region are short of teachers, he reveals that the Education Department has evolved a strategy to solve the problem. There are some schools in the district which have more teachers than the prescribed teacher-student ratio. And in some schools, the situation is vice versa, he tells TNS by telephone.

“After completion of a survey, all ‘additional’ teachers will be transferred to those schools where they are needed more due to larger number of students,” Iqbal Ahmad discloses the government plan. “The process will be completed in 10 to 15 days,” promises the DEO, though teachers at the 330/HR girl high school are not ready to buy the claim, as they have been hearing about it for months with no solution as yet.

The officer, nevertheless, fails to give any assurance about posting a clerk to Nyla Rasheed’s school or providing any equipment for science subjects practicals, as no strategy has been evolved in this regard so far.

However, Chaudhry Irshad Ali, former naib nazim of the area, is unable to understand the novel strategy. “It is totally non-sense,” he says bitterly. “Instead of bringing more girl students to schools, they are going totally in the opposite direction. They should have invited and involved the village elders to help convince all parents to send their children to schools instead of transferring teachers,” the Chaudhry of Chak No 338/HR makes a point.

He says that parents of his area villages are already in a fix as sending their daughters to a high school about 15 kilometres away is not possible for them, especially while no proper transport means are available in the area.

There is no public or private transport system throughout the area. Whosoever wants his daughter to get proper education in a high school, has to give her the pick-and-drop facility on his own, explains Ch Irshad. And it is a pity that over 90 per cent parents are too poor to afford the pick-and-drop facility, financially and practically, adds the ex-naib nazim.

However, there is nothing new in the above mentioned situation as far as the conditions of schools in Pakistan are concerned, particularly those situated in rural areas. According to a research report, Alarming Situation of Girls Education in Pakistan, the national literacy rate is 46 per cent, and the literacy rate for girls is 26 per cent and for women 12 per cent, though this figure includes those people also who can write their own names only. In the two regions, hit hardest by militancy and extremism — Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan — the female literacy rate is between 3 and 8 per cent.

According to statistics given in the World Bank 2008 report, Pakistan enrolled 83 girls for every 103 boys in primary schools. The primary completion rate for girls was only 58 per cent as compared to 70 per cent for boys. Of the 6.8 million currently estimated out-of-school children in Pakistan, at least 4.2 million are girls. Only 35 per cent of rural women above the age of 10 had completed primary education (PLSM, 2008).

Another report revealed that the literacy rate in Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) is in very deplorable condition, with 29.5 per cent males and three per cent females being literate.

According to statistics, released in 2010 by the Federal Education Ministry, the total number of primary schools in Pakistan is 146,691. Of these, 43.8 per cent schools are for boys, 31.5 per cent for girls and the remaining 24.7 per cent schools provide mixed enrolment for both boys and girls. At the secondary level, there are 14,000 lower secondary schools, with 5,000 for girls, and 10,000 upper secondary schools, with only 3,000 for girls.

Thus, Pakistan has fewer schools for girls than for boys. At the provincial or country level, there are also more boys’ schools than girls’ schools. This disparity is more pronounced in rural areas, as is evident from the above mentioned example of Tehsil Fort Abbas of the Punjab.

Prof Ghulam Shabir wonders how come an educated and developed society can be established if we keep depriving half of our population of its right to education? Every year, a number of educational schemes and projects are announced in the annual budget, but they fail to bring about any visible change, says the chairman of Media Studies, The Islamia University of Bahawalpur. It seems most of these schemes and projects fail to see the light of the day, otherwise all Amnas of the country should have availed an opportunity until now to get education in their own locality schools, equipped with all facilities and trained teachers of all subjects, of course.
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10.11.2013
From theoretical to everyday
Language, Gender and Power is an important contribution not only to the field of linguistics, but also social theory, anthropology and public policy
By Yaqoob Khan Bangash


Language has long been recognised as an important part of identity, and its power has variously been seen in the several linguistic province movements in India, and in the Seraiki and Hindko province movements in Pakistan. However, its role in creating gendered notions, gender relations, and hegemony has seldom been the focus of academic research in Pakistan. It is here that Shahid Siddiqui’s recent work on the topic is very timely and useful. In a way, there is nothing ‘new’ in Professor Siddiqui’s book, but then that is its real strength. The book analyses our everyday life to show the ‘interrelationship of language, gender, and power and their impact on one another’ (p. Xvii), and how we are often oblivious of it.

Written in a clear and lucid style, the book is divided into six sections, ranging from the theoretical to the everyday, further exhibiting how pervasive this relationship is. The first part, Language, Representation and Hegemony, is a theoretical and literature review of the subject, and highlights how the non-linguistic aspects of language have often been ignored in South Asia. In fact, in the context of Pakistan, except for Tariq Rahman and Sabiha Mansoor, hardly anyone has written on the relationship of language with power, and almost no one has related it with both gender and power. Using examples from several theorists like Gramsci, Foucault, Chomsky, Siddiqui argues that language plays a ‘powerful role...in [the] construction of social reality and representation of certain “facts” with vested biases’ (p. 24). The example of the ‘War’ Department changing its name to the more acceptable ‘Defence Department’ but with the same purpose, as pointed out by Chomsky, is a case in point.

In the second part, Siddiqui explores the social construction of gender. Using different attributes and categorisations relating to women, Dr Siddiqui shows how women are mostly represented as weak and negative. The tables on page 33 clearly show how such a social construction of the ‘woman’ is undertaken through language. Further, he argues that ‘in contemporary technologically advanced communication systems, the process of stereotyping has gained tremendous speed and impact’ (p. 36). Chapter 5, in this part, highlights how this process of stereotyping begins, in some cases, even before birth and has economic, cultural and familial aspects.

After the theoretical parts, the third section of the books delves into the issue of Language, Gender and Society. It is here that Siddiqui brings his theoretical framework to the South Asian context and assess the issues at hand through an analysis of literature on women and written by women, proverbs and sayings, jokes and matrimonial advertisements. In this section, Siddiqui shows how in South Asian literature the voice of women has consistently been silenced. He notes ‘the social pressure of mainstream society was such that some women had to write with male pseudonyms’ (p. 66), for example Akbari Begum (already a masculine name) published her first story, Guldasta-e-Muhabat in 1903 under the name Abbas Murtaza. He also gives examples of how the premier work on women’s behaviour written by Mualana Ashraf Ali Thanvi, Behishti Zevar, further restricted the life and movement of people.

Shahid Siddiqui further notes how proverbs ‘act as a tool to hegemonise groups, especially women, in South Asian society’ (p. 79). Giving a long list of proverbs and their literal and connotative meaning, he argues that ‘being part of folk wisdom, these sayings and proverbs establish and widen the gender gap every time they are used. Being an important source of social knowledge, these stereotypes affect each segment of society...The social knowledge perpetuated by the proverbs is also internalised by women’ (p. 83). These examples from everyday certainly make the reader aware of the pervasiveness and longevity of such stereotypes.

In chapter 9, Professor Siddiqui analyses gender biases in jokes. He notes ‘most such jokes lead to laughter at the cost of hurting the marginalized groups. Stereotypes, in the form of jokes, gain their strength through their repeated use by the masses and by the legitimizing effect of social institutions in general and media in particular. A woman is turned into an object of laughter, as she is judged by the standards and norms set by men’ (p. 86). Here Siddiqui not only gives examples of several jokes from the Western content, but also from Pakistan and the wider South Asian world.

Chapter 10 then shows how gendered matrimonial advertisements are in South Asia. Marriage is a very important social institution in South Asia and finding a partner is one of the most critical life decisions in the life of a South Asian. Here Dr Siddiqui notes how different attributes are important in advertisements for men and women. He notes that for men profession is one of the most important attributes whereas for women ‘looks’ are important (p. 110). Therefore, Siddiqui concludes ‘the study of these ads on the one hand shows how societal stereotypes are reflected in these ads, and on the other hand suggest that such widely circulated articles are in fact further perpetuating the gendered expectations of society’ (p. 114).

In the next part, Shahid Siddiqui analyses how nursery rhymes and fairly tales also reflect gender stereotypes. He notes ‘gender stereotypes are engraved into children’s minds at an early age through nursery rhymes and fairly tales’ (p. 125). In terms of fairy tales for example, ‘the problem is ultimately resolved by a saviour, who usually happens to be a kind, good looking, cooperative, skilful, and brave male character’ (p. 139). This section is good except that most of the examples used are from the West, whereas similar stereotypes are also present in South Asian tales. Some local examples would have made this section even stronger.

Chapters 15-18 deal with the portrayal of women in the media — advertisements, television plays, songs and films. Here Siddiqui argues that such media ‘being persuasive and pervasive in nature, act as potentially powerful texts that impact people of all ages’ (p. 163). The focus on women being ‘slim,’ as an object of display, the ever present ‘beauty’ creams (i.e., whitening creams), and other similar portrayals of women create an idealistic and unrealistic image of women, which most women can only aspire to. Here the author again delves into the vernacular literature and exhibits the ubiquitousness of such notions.

For example, in Ashfaq Ahmed’s series, Aik Mohabar Sau Afsane, and other dramas, women are portrayed in a stereotypical imagine, ‘where male characters occupied the central place and female characters were mere objects of love’ (p. 170). Siddiqui also points out that even most women writers accept this position and take ‘inspiration from the positional superiority of men’ (p. 171).

The final part six of the book is policy relevant in that it calls for a radical rethink in the way we view language. Professor Siddiqui argues that not only should we stop using gendered language, and promote the use of neutral language, the marginalised should challenge the hegemony of dominant groups through the discourse of language. He also focuses on how educational institutions can be used as tool to empower students, especially women in challenging ‘the gendered stereotypes in the shape of sayings, proverbs jokes, and songs etc... ‘ (p. 205).

This book is a very important contribution not only to the field of linguistics, but also social theory, anthropology and public policy. Its multi and inter-disciplinary approach is one of the great strengths of this book. The book covers a lot of ground and throws out a number of questions, so I hope that this work serves the purpose of being the first of many which articulate the very important relationship between language, gender and power in our society.

The writer is the Chairperson of the Department of History, Forman Christian College, and tweets at @BangashYK. He can be contacted at: yaqoob.bangash@gmail.com.

Language, Gender, & Power: The Politics of Representation and Hegemony in South Asia
Author: Shahid Siddiqui
Publisher: Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2013.
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17.11.2013
Vagaries of greed
Redistribution of land from ‘feudal’ parasites to hardworking small farmers would reduce poverty through asset distribution, leading to both equity and efficiency
By Muhammad Ali Jan


The struggle for redistributive land reforms, once a policy linchpin of many post-colonial states, has seen a continuous decline in the last two decades.

The decline has manifested itself both in terms of scant attention paid by national governments and international development agencies towards any serious land redistribution measures, as well as a decisive change in the social forces that were once aligned behind the land reform agenda — farmers’ movements and sympathetic political parties. Both have back-tracked on their historic commitment to a land redistribution agenda and have moved to issues of remunerative prices, water rates, fertiliser and credit policies.

This has occurred despite the fact that land distribution continues to be extremely unequal, with about five per cent of farms owning close to 35 per cent of the total cultivable area on the one hand, while 90 per cent of total farms continue to be unviable and have to rely on off-farm work wherever possible, in order to subsist.

While the attempts at land redistribution by both the Ayub and Bhutto governments in 1959 and 1972 didn’t amount to much, the death-knell for a government sanctioned land reform was sounded by the extremely reactionary judgment of the Shariat Court bench in the Qazalbash Waqf Case (PLD 1990 SC 99) which argued that land reforms were contrary to the spirit of Islam; since all property actually belonged to Allah, the state had no right to interfere with this property, let alone forcibly acquire it without compensation.

Of course, this abstract and false reasoning conveniently forgot that the current land distribution was largely the outcome of the not-so-distant past when an occupying colonial power had distributed land to powerful landholders in exchange for their loyalty — an ‘interference’ with Allah’s property, which excluded both women and lower castes from a share in land and thereby set the basis for the elitist, patriarchal and caste-ridden society we find ourselves in today.

In light of this background, the Supreme Court’s recent acceptance of Awami Workers Party’s petition, led by eminent lawyer and activist Abid Hassan Minto to reopen the Qazalbash Waqf Case and reverse the judgement by the Federal Shariat Court, is an important first step to righting a historic wrong and should be welcomed by progressives.

At the same time, there is the undeniable fact of immense socio-economic change having taken place in Pakistan since land reforms were first put on the agenda; a large and fast growing urban population, highly capital intensive pockets of agriculture, a working population that increasingly seeks employment outside farming and greater investment in the construction and service sectors by capital-holders.

This has led to serious concern from certain quarters as to the efficacy of land reforms in the completely transformed context of today.

It is, therefore, crucial to examine the historical basis for land reforms in Pakistan to asses both the changes that have taken place and to answer whether we have indeed missed the train on this front. The tentative answer is that there is definitely scope for land reforms in today’s Pakistan, but as we shall hope to demonstrate, not for the same reasons that were historically put forth.

The attraction that land reforms held for such a long time in the minds of post-colonial governments, progressive intellectuals as well as social movements had much to do with the purported solution they provided to the twin goals of equity and efficiency that had seemed almost impossible to reconcile.

The chief targets for reform were the ‘feudal’ landlords: without getting into the appropriateness of the term ‘feudal’ for Pakistan (or South Asia for that matter), what was usually meant by it were a group of large landholders, usually absentees who cultivated their lands under some form of share-cropping basis, often a 50:50 share of the crop. The arrangement was believed to be such that even without a change in the stipulated share, a tenant was barely left with enough to fulfill the consumption needs of his family, sometimes even requiring loans from landlords or moneylenders in exchange for his family’s unpaid labour to the creditor. Thus, his priority for subsistence meant he simply did not have enough surplus to think about reinvestment in land productivity.

On the other side, the landlord appropriating the tenant’s surplus was much more interested in ‘ostentatious consumption’ rather than productive investment and would spend it unproductively on various goods and services to reproduce his ‘parasitic lifestyle’ (in the words of the Land Reform Commission 1959). Since a single landlord had leased out land to several families on this arrangement, the system led to dynamic implications by dampening productivity in agriculture and reproducing the poverty of the tenant at the level of the sector as a whole.

At the same time, it was demonstrated that those farmers who cultivated their own lands had a greater incentive for improving its productivity and cultivated it more intensively. Thus, a redistribution of land from such ‘feudal’ parasites to hardworking small farmers would not only reduce poverty through asset distribution, but also lead to much greater growth and accumulation within agriculture, thereby leading to both equity and efficiency outcomes.

What seemed a vicious circle at the level of theory became ever more complicated when actual implementation at the policy level came about. The tension latent between equity and efficiency manifested in the issue of setting the landholding ceiling: while the break-up of large estates was seen as crucial for loosening the stranglehold of the landed elite, it was nonetheless important to not set the ceiling too low in order to retain agriculture as a profitable sector for investment.

Ayub’s 1959 Land Commission argued that ‘although ceilings of 500 (irrigated) and 1000 (unirrigated) acres would seem fairly large’ when viewed from a ‘social justice’ lens alone they were nonetheless ‘necessary’ in order to ‘provide incentives towards greater production’. Bhutto’s ceilings at 150 and 300 acres of irrigated and unirrigated land were based on a similar logic: as he explained to a gathering of industrialists in Karachi in 1972, the breakup of feudal holdings was essential but at the same time, ‘we have tried to preserve incentives for the continuation of agriculture as an attractive and profitable vocation for the enterprising and enlightened farmers’.

Ironically, both Ayub and Bhutto were echoing the viewpoint of liberal British colonial officers from a quarter of a century ago (exemplified by men such as Malcolm Darling, Hubert Calvert, Thorburn etc) who had presented the capitalist ‘yeoman’ farmer as the vanguard of the farming community, being superior to both the backward peasantry and the large landlords.

In a move reminiscent of the government’s current attitude towards the Taliban, a dichotomy was created between ‘good’ landlords who were modernising, profit-minded gentlemen farmers and differentiated from ‘bad’ landlords, parasitic, ostentatious and with a ‘feudal’ outlook towards the economy. The policy objective now was to give incentives to such farmers to modernise agriculture as a whole through the introduction of Green Revolution technologies such as High-Yield variety seeds, tubewells and tractors at subsidised rates.

As the issue of radically redistributing land to small farmers and the landless took a backseat to that of enhancing productivity within the existing land distribution, the government’s land and tenancy reform became nothing more than a threat, a stick with which to push the landed elite towards the carrot, that is the adoption of green revolution technologies at highly subsidised rates. Ironically, it was the same parasitic landlords of government rhetoric and policy papers, the waderas of Sindh or the zamindars of Punjab, who took up the carrot with glee and benefited immensely from it.

Today, although there has been a diffusion of this technology however uneven to small and medium farmers, it is still the rural elites that have benefited overwhelmingly from these changes, having procured more than 75 per cent of the total formal institutional credit and diversified their investment portfolios into industry and services. Therefore, from a pure economic efficiency point of view, we no longer live in the age of the ‘parasitic feudal lord’ — today’s landed elite is thoroughly profit-minded and their ostentatious lifestyles (similar to the urban elites) are sustained by their ‘economic rationality’: it would appear that the case for land reforms is thus definitively closed.

However, what such a narrow view conveniently ignores is that the alleged productivity benefits of large farms are often premised on a range of hidden and unhidden subsidies and rents that accrue to them as a result of their control over political structures. Furthermore, it refuses to engage with the more pressing question of prioritising ‘efficiency’ over social justice when it clearly fails to deliver to the poor and vulnerable.

As the experience of Pakistan and various other third world countries clearly demonstrates, the distinctive feature of economic growth in the era of liberalisation has been the decoupling of growth from decent employment generation — a combination of factors such as increased labour-saving technologies, vastly greater power and mobility of capital vis-à-vis labour, preference for investment in activities with quick returns and low job creation and the general decline in public spending by governments owing to the fiscal tyranny imposed by International Financial Institutions have all meant that lack of decent job creation (certainly not unique to the current era but greatly exacerbated by it) has turned into a crisis of employment.

As a result, the share-croppers evicted off the land by technology adopting landlords, or the small farmers seeking off-farm work due to distress caused by policy bias towards the rural elite, do not find a burgeoning industrial sector that absorbs their labour and provides decent employment, similar to the particular experience of Western European and North American industrialisation. Instead, they become part of the vast majority of working poor who reproduce themselves in increasingly insecure and oppressive employment conditions, either in waged or in the form of various survival activities, the overwhelming majority of which are part of the ‘informal sector’ where they are fragmented on the basis of gender, caste, class, religion and ethnicity.

The vast majority of these labourers, therefore, straddle the rural-urban divide without settling into either of these terrains since the urban sector is not a stepping stone towards a better settled life in the city, but a temporary abode for labour which can be pushed back to its place of origin when no longer required. According to official statistics, 75 per cent of Pakistan’s workforce is employed in such precarious jobs, while others put the number close to 90 per cent.

It is this crisis of decent employment born out of an obsession with growth, which has put the question of land redistribution back onto the agenda, this time however not as a tool for increasing productivity in agriculture but as a crucial element of a broader struggle in pursuit of social justice and dignified livelihoods for the vast majority of working poor. If the virtues of efficient large scale farming do not trickle down to the rural poor, and off-farm employment is simply not enough to guarantee a life with dignity, then the break-up of such large landholdings as a livelihood strategy for the poor must take precedence over considerations of efficiency that overwhelmingly benefit the rich. That this is not some utopian fantasy but a demand emanating from actual struggles over land in the contemporary era is clearly demonstrated through the experience of the largest social movement over land in the world: Brazil’s Landless Worker’s Movement (MST).

In one of the most heavily urbanised countries in the world (88 per cent of the population is urban), the MST has fought for access to land for the poor through a combination of legal and illegal methods, squatting over and cultivating land belonging both to the state and estate owners and evoking the clause within the Brazilian constitution of 1988 which states that property must fulfill a social function. It is largely composed of small farmers, landless rural labourers as well as retrenched workers from mines, industry and service sectors who argue that due to the government’s failure to provide decent employment, it has no right to interfere with their own efforts to attain it.

In this way they have put questions of dignity and social justice above the single-minded focus of growth without trickle down.

Finally, just as in Brazil, the blurred boundary between urban and rural in today’s context means that the land redistribution question must include both sites into one comprehensive strategy: just as it is important to keep social reproduction of the poor above technical and economic efficiency of cultivation, it is likewise important to decide whether it is justified to transform farm land into housing societies for the elite, or whether informal settlements must be razed to the ground to make way for five star hotels, shopping malls and super highways.

The imperative of social justice demands that the housing needs of the poor come before the luxury needs of the elites.

The struggles of our contemporary era are struggles over resources, with land being a principal prize in the struggle. We are currently witnessing this struggle unfold with violent consequences in Karachi and to a lesser extent in other cities of Pakistan. It is, therefore, imperative to decide what side of the divide we are on: with the principles of inclusivity, human dignity and social justice or the vagaries of private greed.

m.ali.jan985@gmail.com
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17.11.2013
Sectarianism through history
By Tahir Kamran


Muharram brings with it a brutal demonstration of the ‘clash and collision of sectarian identities’. The mayhem caused at Gujranwala, where three Shia mourners were killed as a result of firing on the Shia Majlis organised to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hussain, is ample testimony to it. To our dismay, any incident of Shia-killing has ceased to surprise many Pakistanis now, even out of Muharram.

But when did sectarianism become the principal constituent of our identity?

According to many who speak against the Shia faith, sectarianism has risen to prominence since the February of 1990, when Maulana Haq Nawaz Jhangvi was killed in Jhang. Maulana Jhangvi was the founder of Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan, an anti-Shia outfit, which he conjured into existence in September 1985 at Jhang. That outfit was ostensibly a response to the creation of a Shia organisation Tehreek-i-Nifaz-i-Fiqh-i-Jafria at Bhakkar, a town in the south east of Lahore in 1979 by Shia cleric Mufti Jaffer Hussain. He adroitly mobilised the Shia community in 1979 against Zia ul Haq’s intended promulgation of Zakat and Ushr Ordinance in Pakistan, a legislation that radically conflicted with Shia jurisprudence.

Islamabad was virtually besieged by the Shias for several days, with the result that Zia had to give way. Shias were exempted from Zakat which, for them, was a morale-boosting victory.

Both these organisations had their respective militant wings, Lashkar-i-Jhangvi and Sipah-i-Muhammad. Encouraged by this outcome, Mufti Jaffer Hussain continued to build on the foundation of Tehreek-i-Nifaz-i-Fiqh-i-Jafria. This mobilisation of Shias, avidly supported by Iran under Imam Khomeini, nudged the Sunni-Deobandi faction into forming their own organisation.

Many analysts attribute the ensuing sectarian frenzy, that plagues Pakistan even to this day, to the assassination of Allama Arif ul Husseini, a charismatic Turi alim of Shia persuasion from Parachinar, in 1988, only a few months before Zia ul Haq’s plane exploded near Bahawalpur. Some speculate that the targeted killing that Lashkar-i-Jhangvi has fostered since its inception in 1994 was in fact sparked by the killing of Ehsan Illahi Zaheer, a firebrand Ahl-i-Hadith scholar, with a feverish antipathy towards the Shias.

All said and done, however, pinning down a single explanation for violence only leads to tenuous conclusions. Tracing the evolution of Shia-Sunni divergence through history, however, is a more manageable task.

Sources alluding to the anti-Shia stance among Sunnis circumscribe the pamphlet of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi (Mujjadid Alif Sani) entitled ‘Rad-I Rawafiz’, which was an acerbic response to the soaring influence of Iranian nobility in the Mughal Court. One ought to bear in mind that continual migration from Iran to India had become commonplace since Humayun’s sojourn in Iran as an exile. The assassination of renowned contemporary Shia alim Nurullah Shushtri at the behest of Jehangir is also proposed as an illustration of the anti-Shia posture adopted by the Mughals.

Similarly Aurangzeb’s Sunni disposition and his rampaging expeditions to Golcanda and Bijapur (the Shia States) are also cited as evidence that the odds had been against the Shias in the 17th century.

Having referred to all these incidents, it is hard to notice the anti-Shia ideology and practices impinging upon the collective perception of Indian Muslims simply because the difference between the two sects had blurred. Even Shah Waliullah’s drift towards puritanical Islam, and Shah Abdul Aziz’s condemnatory treatise ‘Tuhfa tu Athna Athari’ could not make any great impact on the general Muslim populace.

It was only after the creation of Dar ul Ulum Deoband (1867) that both of them came to be celebrated for their reformist-scholarly prowess. Besides, sectarian ideology started pervading into the Sufi orders too. Nineteenth century Chishti Sufis like Suliman Taunswi and Shams ud Din Sialvi had turned anti-Shia. Up till early 19th century instruction in religion, the Juma prayer was invariably offered together by both the communities, because Shias did not organise separate Friday prayers.

But then, from the second half of the 18th century, influences from Arabia led to the crystallising of sectarian identities. Thus, a revisionism found its foothold here, raising questions over the validity of the basic postulates of Shi’ism, and the sectarian camaraderie prevalent in South Asia until this time was further eroded by the dismantling of centralised Mughal power structures.

Political decline tends to give rise to exclusionary behaviour and religious Puritanism is propounded as the most efficacious route towards the political revival of the Muslims, not only in the case of India but also in Turkey. The emergence of Shia rule in Awadh, which lasted for 136 years, the advent of Usuli Ulema and the proliferation of Shia in the Punjab obviously contributed significantly in establishing the sectarian schism. During the same era, the Shia faith began to strike roots in Awadh, particularly when Asaf ud Daulah became the Nawab (1775-1797AD). His devotion and profound interest in the Shia faith not only helped in its spread in Awadh and beyond, but such ventures as Asfi Imambara and Dargah-e-Hazrat Abbas in Lucknow were undertaken which later on served as powerful symbols of the newly emergent Shia ethos of Lucknow.

The commencement of congregational Friday prayers among Shias was another ‘epoch making event’ of Asaf ud Daulah’s reign. The doctrinal chasm between the two sects became more pronounced when Usuli alim Dildar Ali Nasirabadi Ghufran Ma’ab started castigating Sufi beliefs and practices like the concept of Wahdat ul Wujud, the doctrine of Kashf (inspiration), wajd (mystical ecstacy) and practices like singing, dancing and beating drums. More provocative was the Usuli practice of publically cursing the first three Caliphs, Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman. As Cole reveals, Dildar Ali and his student Kinturi defended such practice, generally called as tabarra for usurping the claim of Ali as the successor of the Prophet.

From the 1820s and particularly with the ascendancy of Nasir ud Din Hayder as Badshah in 1827, tabarra during Muharram became an abiding feature in Awadh to the chagrin of Sunnis. But the situation changed markedly when Sunnis retaliated to the recitation of Tabarra by instituting the practice of Madhe Sahaba, a fervent affirmation of the righteousness of the Companions of the Prophet. Majlis-i-Ahrar played an important role in popularising the campaign of Madhe Sahaba. It led to violent clashes between the two sects which continued intermittently and which even the recommendations of Piggot Committee (est.1908-9) or the report of Justice Allsop (1937) were unable to control.

The most violent sectarian riots took place in 1938-39 when the UP government decided to clamp a ban on Madhe Sahaba on certain days.

The inferences drawn from the history of sectarian clashes between the adherents of the two denominations point to the fact that Tabarra against the first three caliphs sits at the very heart of the conflict. That exactly is the reason the biggest anti-Shia organisation was named the way it is, Sipah-i-Sahaba (one must read Sahaba as Abu Bakr, Umar and Usman). Other polemical disputations have seldom led to a situation of open confrontation.

Now that the polarisation between the sects has widened further, the chances of any rapprochement seem slight. The funneling of funds from abroad to various militant organisations is exacerbating this problem. Sadly enough in Pakistan, what is meant by Sharia is the intended preponderance of Sunni Hanafi law, which would be promulgated obviously at the expense of other minority sects.

Now the situation has come to such a pass that, even if Shias abandon tabarra altogether, their safety, particularly in the days of Muharram, can hardly be guaranteed. The Government’s weak-kneed approach in extirpating the sectarian differences is encouraging those who use religion to shed blood and cause mayhem.

Until this changes, history will keep repeating itself every Muharram.

The writer is a noted Pakistani historian, currently the Iqbal Fellow at the University of Cambridge as professor in the Centre of South Asian Studies
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17.11.2013
A panacea or disaster?
Is giving android tablets to all children a good educational practice? The Punjab government should pose this question to educators and psychologists instead of taking decisions on the basis of whims or political considerations
By Irfan Muzaffar


In July this year, Punjab’s Education Minister Rana Mashhood Ahmad Khan announced his government’s decision to give free tablet computers to children aged ten and above in all 55,000 public schools of Punjab. Commenting on this decision, a senior educator friend who, like most of us, is usually frustrated with the performance of education sector in Pakistan was jubilant. Politicians, according to him, were finally coming around to do the right thing in education, which was to put the mobile information technology directly into children’s hands. But I was uncertain.

How could one not be supportive of a near revolutionary idea, which promised to place a learning machine in the hand of each child — which is what an android tablet was assumed to be? He reminded me of the famous hole in the wall project in India. This project was premised on a simple notion that once provided with an environment that stimulated curiosity as well as provided the tools needed to explore, the children self-taught themselves as well as taught each other without needing a teacher.

The visionary behind the project, Dr Sugata Mitra and his colleagues, had demonstrated this in 1999 by providing children in a Delhi slum with a PC wired to the Internet through a hole in the wall of their office premises. Mitra received TED 2013 prize recently for his talk in which he expressed his wish in these words: “Build a School in the Cloud, where children can explore and learn from one another.”(http://tinyurl.com/cdosp9c).

One cannot quarrel with enthusiasm backed with solid evidence. Moreover, Mitra’s finding also resonated with what we now experience everyday in our homes. Give your child an android or IOS system phone and she will put you to shame by the speed with which she would master various features of the phone. My niece, barely five years old, knows exactly what to do on my android phone to get her favourite video games. Of course, she learnt to navigate herself, as Mitra and his colleagues had found, by merely being given the opportunity to freely explore various features of my phone.

However, I was still unsure if we had enough reasons to start cheering the Punjab government? I had no reasonable grounds on which to doubt Mitra’s findings, especially when my own experience supported them. Yet, I felt that giving tablets to every child was an expensive proposition and for this reason alone it merited some more scrutiny. Mitra had not evaluated the use of tablets by children on a scale as large as an entire state.

To the best of my knowledge, I was not aware of any other country in the world, not even the rich countries that could easily afford such initiatives, which had distributed tablets to all children. Were tablets indeed the much-awaited panacea for our educational ills? We can only establish this by asking for evidence and it should be government’s responsibility to make and defend an evidence-based case for the policy alternative it wished to adopt. Instead, it seemed to be getting away by merely announcing a decision. So it was also a matter of making our democracy work by not letting the government to get away by mere ornamental announcements. Evidence was needed to justify a policy decision that would affect the lives of million of children.

As I mentioned above, I did not question the evidence about great achievements of a hole in the wall project. I just thought it was not sufficient enough to justify an expensive policy for universal provision of tablets. There was no evidence that a tablet in the hand of every child offered the same opportunities for collaboration as the hole in the wall. The latter was not a one-to-one but a one-to-many encounter with technology. Smart phone and tablets in the hands of each individual is a qualitatively different experience.

Some social psychologists have found that too much time with tablets disconnect the students from the larger community and detract them from engaging in collaborative social activities. If this is correct, the tablets are likely to individuate the children at a very early stage in their life, which may be undesirable. Therefore, my friend was wrong in relying on the evidence from a hole in the wall project to justify the universal provision of tablets.

We need an open and honest debate on public policy provision that takes the policy formulation out of the domain of kitchen cabinets and petty interests into the public domain. Policy entrepreneurs who are bound to particular policy proposals abound in any society. They usually have a vested interest in the policy. For instance, a technology firm may support the work of policy entrepreneurs lobbying for universal provision of tablets. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this as long as a robust process of public scrutiny and debate is in place. In this case, such a process could take the form of government commissioning specific reviews and studies and developing a justification on the basis of evidence generated by these. Specifically, it could invite a review of literature about the use of tablets in classrooms or commission randomised control trials to determine whether or not, everything else being equal, providing tablets to some learners left them better off as compared to those without the tablets.

A rudimentary financial estimate suggests that procurement of tablets may cost the government approximately USD500 million. This estimate excludes the administrative costs involved in procuring, stocking, and distributing these gadgets. Of course, once in the hands of the children, it is highly likely that many of these tablets will be soon in need of repairs and replacement. Will the manufacturer be able to replace the faulty and broken tablets fast enough? One justification offered so far by the minister is that tablets will replace the paper back textbooks — they would now be digitised and uploaded on the tablets. But a student could replace a lost textbook at a tiny fraction of the cost of the android tablet.

Aren’t tablets a bit too expensive if meant to solely replace the paperback textbooks? There is definitely a need to commission a cost/benefit analysis in order to establish the financial feasibility of this policy. Why can’t the government put the university-based economists provide the public with a cost/benefit analysis of this proposal. Of course, we should also ask how the costs involved in procuring and maintaining the tablets will be met.

Is giving tablets to all children a good educational practice? The government should pose this question to educators and psychologists and get a rigorous answer. Is universal provision of tablets in schools good economics? Let us pose this question to our economists and get a good answer. Let the standing committees and the representatives of the public hear these answers and take a decision based on solid evidence instead of whims and fancies of an education minister or a corporate leader.

I say this not to disparage the intelligence of the education minister, but to argue that our ethos of policy making need a drastic change. We should be aware of the practice of politicians and bureaucrats using their whims and fancies as a basis of policies instead of hard evidence.

We have made similar mistakes of not using evidence to justify policy alternatives throughout our educational history. Numerous examples can be adduced of our part education policies put in place without any evidentiary basis. I will briefly mention three. We started giving tuition vouchers to children attending some selected private schools in Punjab without debating the long-term financial sustainability of vouchers programmes or even the basis for supporting the private schools with public funds. We increased the length of our pre-service teacher education programmes from one year to four years without doing any policy analysis and without taking due cognizance of the costs involved in running these programmes. We decided to make English the medium of instruction in all public schools in Punjab only to discover later what was obvious from the beginning, i.e. the teachers could not teach in a language they did not know well.

So instead of cheering the government, let us ask what justification is the education minister offering for this policy. The only justification given by the government so far is that tablets will replace the textbooks. The Punjab government has presented no case for this policy that is based on solid evidence. The expense and issues involved are too big to make this decision on the basis of whims or political considerations.

Let the Punjab government not rush into buying tablets and instead, for once, take the lead in changing the policy culture in Pakistan by giving top priority to protection of public interest inviting open debate and research on all matters of public interest including the proposal for universal provision of android tablets to children.
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17.11.2013
Ravishing Ravi
The governments in Indian and Pakistani Punjab must guarantee the rights of all rivers so that they are allowed to flow in their natural course
By Noreen Haider


It was a beautiful spring day in April and the scenery was picture perfect. The day was mild and the sun only added to the vitality of the day. Travelling along the BRBD (Barki, Ravi, Bambanwala, Deepalpur) canal, in the outskirts of Lahore, the small private road led to the India Pakistan border. There was lush greenery everywhere and wheat was ripening in the late spring warmth. My objective was to visit the exact point where River Ravi enters Pakistan.

After travelling almost for 40 minutes along the canal, I reached the waterworks called Ravi Siphon. It is at the Ravi Siphon that the BRBD Canal carrying water from River Chenab actually transverses River Ravi from underneath it as it enters the outskirts of Lahore. The gushing canal water is siphoned under the Ravi river bed through huge barrels fixed underneath it, totaling 158 ft. in length. Ravi meanwhile flows serenely over it quite oblivious to the fact that it is crossing an international border from India to Pakistan.

I found the river water sparkling and there was not even a trace of any trash visible in it. It was glistening at places where the sunlight caught it at the right angle and it twinkled happily. It was utterly unrecognizable from the sorry sight of Ravi that flows along the entrance of Lahore city.

A few kilometers ahead of the siphon is the India-Pakistan border and an observation post of Pakistan Rangers. There is marked the exact entry point of Ravi River into Pakistan. The reason I wanted to make that trip was to see the state of water and collect some data on the river flow but I was not prepared for what I found.

I belong to Lahore and have seen Ravi hundreds of times but the river that I met as I reached the border was another river altogether from the one I knew so well. This river was beautiful, clean and calm flowing elegantly in its course. The alluvial soil around the bed had created lush fields and the ground water was of excellent quality as well. There were herds of cattle grazing along the river and some 85 villages that thrive on both sides of the banks.

But just few kilometers after entering Pakistan, the condition of river starts deteriorating. After travelling ten kilometers, the river reaches Shahdara Town near Lahore where the water from municipal and industrial drains is dumped into it. The water instantly changes colour and becomes blackish with objectionable foul smell. As the river flows further downstream, untreated raw municipal sewage, industrial waste and solid waste material from no less than fifteen major drains is dumped into it.

According to the official data by Punjab Irrigation and Power Department, the biggest of these drains are Shadman drain with 162 cusec discharge, Farukabad drain, 106 cusecs, Buddha Ravi drain, 44 cusecs, Outfall drain, 127.56 cusecs, Gulshan-e-Ravi disposal, 176.66 cusecs, BabuSabu drain, 165 cusecs, and Hudiara drain with 430 cusecs of waste water discharge. Raw sewage from City District Lahore’s municipal drains is also discharged untreated in Ravi at various points.

Other than that, there are thousands of cusecs of discharge of untreated industrial toxic effluent dumped into the river. The heavy metals and poisons water eventually end up in the cultivation fields along the river and degrade the quality of soil reducing yield and contaminating crops. It is also the major source of ground water pollution as the affluent waste contains large amounts of toxic chemicals, heavy metals and microbial contamination. The water is even unfit for washing and bathing.

All the industries along River Ravi without exception are dumping untreated waste water without the slightest consideration to the criminal abuse done to the river as well as being an environmental disaster.

Just to give an idea of the enormity of the situation briefly, there are about 299 industrial units reported in district Faisalabad that dispose of about 453.47 cusec of untreated effluent into the surface drainage system that ends in Ravi and Chenab river. The different industries include textile, dying, chemical, Petro-chemical, pulp and paper, hosiery, soap and detergent manufacturing plants, oil refineries, sugar and flour mills, tanneries, distilleries, synthetic material plants for drugs, fibers, rubbers, plastics, and hosiery etc.

In district Sialkot, 58 industrial units are disposing of 56.66 cusec of untreated effluent into the surface drainage system which eventually enters Ravi through various drains.

About 271 industrial units in Lahore district are disposing of its 281.6 cusec untreated waste water into Ravi. Mostly the industries are of textile, chemical, food processing, pulp and paper processing, poultry, dairy, plastic, paint, pesticides, leather, tanneries and pharmaceuticals.

About 22 different industrial units reported in district Kasur dispose of 17.96 cusec untreated highly toxic waste effluent including nitrogenous fertilizer into the surface drainage system.

The list goes on and on along major cities and industries criminally using the river as a sewage drain. Especially the 72 kilometer stretch from Ravi Siphon to Balloki has the worst contamination and woefully, there Ravi actually turns into a sludge carrier.

At Balloki, the water from River Ravi is diverted through Balloki-Sulemanki Link Canal to Southern Punjab and the people there are forced to use the polluted water for all purposes including drinking and washing which is causing serious health issues there.

The real culprit of this massive abuse of River and canals is the government of Punjab which has been and is totally blind to it all. There is an Environment Protection Agency in Punjab which consists of skeleton staff and is totally impotent. The industrialists have a huge influence on politicians as they are the chief supporters in their elections. Many important politicians in Punjab are themselves industrialists so they have absolutely no interest in putting any restrictions on the hundreds of industrial units for treatment of waste water or even being partially responsible for it.

The old name of Ravi was Parvashni or Iravati. It originates in the Himalayas in the Chamba District of Himachal Perdesh in India. From there its clean icy glacial waters take a north-westerly course and flow through the picturesque Dilhousie Town before it enters Punjab near Madhopur and Pathankot District. In its natural course it flows in Indian plains for 80 kilometres before entering Pakistan. Travelling 725 kilometers, it finally falls into the Chenab River.

Ravi is actually among the three eastern rivers that were divided between India and Pakistan according to the Indus Water Treaty. Under the Indus Water Treaty (1960), all the waters of the eastern tributaries of the Indus River originating in India, i.e. the Sutlej, Beas and Ravi rivers taken together, were made available for the unrestricted use of India. So for the major part the water of Ravi is mostly diverted through the Madhopur Headworks and used for irrigation in Indian Punjab.

According to IWT, it was decided that the water from western rivers would be diverted in Ravi and Sutlej by link canals to maintain them, however, that did not turn out to be quite enough to keep them alive and healthy.

Because of the mistreatment of this beautiful river, all its flora and fauna and aquatic life has died and with it the once vibrant river is also dying a painful death.

Rivers are not just water bodies but beyond that, they must be seen as legal entities and they must be allocated some rights. The most important among them is the right to life and flow. The governments in Indian and Pakistani Punjab must guarantee the rights of all rivers so that they are allowed to flow in their natural course as the lifelines of our planet earth.
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17.11.2013
Advances in genetics
Human genetics is today the most exciting and possibly the most important area of study not only for eventual disease prevention but also for the possible cure
By Syed Mansoor Hussain


What is ‘health’ is an interesting question. For most physicians, it is the absence of disease and physical impairment. The broadest definition is probably the one given by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 1946 when it defined health as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” (Wikipedia)

During the last few decades things have started to change. The most important change is the greater emphasis on ‘mental health’ issues. For centuries, mental health was never fully understood or treated as a real disease. Advances in neuro-chemistry and ‘live brain imaging’ have added considerably to the understanding of mental problems. With the development of medicines that can affect brain chemistry, many of the well-known ‘psychiatric’ problems have become amenable to treatment.

Unfortunately as happens with almost every advance in medicine, there is the possibility of excessive and perhaps inappropriate use of medical treatments. Over the last few decades, increasing number of people are receiving psychiatric diagnosis and are being treated with medications that makes one wonder as to why there is this sudden ‘epidemic’ of mental problems that did not exist a generation ago.

Since ‘psychiatry’ is not my area of professional expertise so I will not expound on this issue. But as a physician and a concerned citizen, I must admit that there is probably a tendency towards over diagnosis and possibly overtreatment of ‘mental health’ problems. I will give two examples. First of the overactive child who is now labelled as ‘hyperactive’ and placed on medications or the adult who after bereavement or emotional upheaval becomes ‘sad’ and is treated for depression. In spite of these reservations, it is important to understand that from a ‘health’ point of view, mental problems are still vastly under diagnosed and undertreated especially in a poor country like Pakistan.

The WHO definition of health cited above includes ‘social wellbeing’ as another aspect of health. Clearly, physicians and even society in general cannot bring about social wellbeing through legislation or government intervention. However, it must be stated that poverty is one of the greatest detriment to social wellbeing. As such poverty alleviation not only improves virtually every parameter of social wellbeing but also improves health in all ages by providing education as well as greater access to ‘formal’ healthcare.

So now to some more interesting changes that have occurred about our conceptual understanding of health. The ‘apparent’ absence of disease or infirmity at a particular point in time does not necessarily make a person healthy. For instance, a 50-year-old man walking around with a significantly blocked heart artery might seem quite healthy until the time he has a major heart attack. As physicians often say, everybody is healthy until they get sick. If we exclude malnutrition, accidents, trauma and infections, almost all causes of future or ‘imminent’ disease are already present in our bodies. It is for this reason that ‘preventive medicine’ is becoming increasingly prominent.

The most frequently discussed prelude to ‘continued’ good health can be summed up as ‘life style choices’. Eating well, being physically active and avoiding smoking and excessive alcohol consumption among others are well known to promote good health. Being excessively overweight is a risk for future disease especially adult onset diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease and is probably the most well-known result of improper life style choices.

The important point to make here is that an excessively overweight but otherwise ‘healthy’ person will in all likelihood develop medical problems with age. The same is true of a ‘heavy’ smoker or of somebody who drinks too much. But not all obese people will end up with the diseases mentioned above, and not all smokers will end up with lung cancer or breathing problems, nor will all heavy drinkers end up with liver problems.

Even though these ‘life style’ choices definitely increase the chance of developing serious medical problems as time passes, the opposite is also a fact. People who have never been overweight can still develop adult onset diabetes, high blood pressure or heart disease. And even non-smokers can develop lung cancer or breathing problems.

Perceptions about being overweight are to some degree also a cultural problem and often change over time. More than a generation ago, for patients ‘thin’ doctors were unlikely to be good doctors since they obviously did not make enough money to eat well. Today, overweight doctors are looked upon as people who cannot be good doctors since they cannot even take care of themselves.

When it comes to women, even being slightly overweight is now looked upon with some distaste. But an interesting medical reality is that people who are slightly overweight do much better when they become seriously sick than those who are thin. So we have to separate the really overweight from those that society and ‘fashion’ magazines think are overweight. An important point worth remembering is that ‘central obesity’ (belly fat) or collection of fat deposits around the abdomen and especially within abdomen around the stomach and intestines is much worse than fat spread all over the body.

One of the most important causes of future disease in healthy people is genetics or inherited tendencies. The fact that heart disease and many forms of cancer runs in families was always well known. As we study human genetics and the connection between inherited tendencies and disease, we realise how interconnected these two really are. It would seem that many evidently healthy people are possibly destined to develop serious disease in time. These can range from brain diseases, heart disease, many forms of cancer and the gamut of what we call ‘autoimmune’ disease.

Recent advances in genetics especially after the human ‘genome’ was mapped have provided greater impetus to this form of study. Frankly, human genetics is today the most exciting and possibly the most important area of study not only for ‘eventual’ disease prevention but also for the possible ‘cure’ of many types of disease through development of ‘individualised’ medicines. And one of the more interesting areas under consideration is prolongation of life.

Perhaps the most well-known example of the basic point I have tried to make of apparently healthy people not being really healthy is when it comes to particular types of genes that predispose women to breast cancer. Recently, the famous actress Angelina Jolie underwent a ‘prophylactic’ or preventive removal of both her breasts because of her family history and because the presence of a particular gene (BRCA 1) increased her chance of developing breast cancer up to almost ‘87 per cent’ over time.

However, the important thing to understand about genetics is that while we have a tremendous amount of information becoming rapidly available, we still don’t know how to use much of this information as far as prevention or treatment of a particular disease is concerned. Many times in the past, medical developments have promised a lot but over time we were disappointed. After all, when antibiotics were discovered almost 70 years ago we thought that infections will be gone forever but it has not happened.

The writer is former professor and chairman Department of Cardiac Surgery, KEMU/Mayo Hospital, Lahore. smhmbbs70@yahoo.com
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17.11.2013
Youth affairs
With over half the population less than 20 years old,
various sets of skills, loans and guidance are needed to make them useful citizens
By Dr Noman Ahmad


Reasonable follow up is in process on the important initiatives announced by the prime minister a few weeks ago, pertinent to youth. Fee reimbursement and disbursing scholarships among young folks from less developed areas, laptop computer distributions, skill development options and loans for small businesses are welcome moves.

The critics are of the view that instead of direct subsidies, the prime minister may have used these investments to generate a snowballing effect. Criticisms and supporting arguments aside, it is vital to note that more than half of the national population is less than 21 years old. For obvious reasons, they have very different needs compared to other demographic categories.

Opportunities of appropriate education, skill development, enabling environment to sustain a healthy lifestyle, sports and recreation facilities and above all, a promising scenario for a prosperous future are some of the essentials rightfully demanded by the young people of our country. There are many crucial areas related to youth affairs that need intervention on top priority.

Higher education sector needs attention. The total number of institutions of higher learning is not more than 200. Not more than 5-7 percent young people have the basic probability to enroll in a university. Even within this narrow opportunity, the guarantee for quality education is extremely limited. The system of vocational and technical education in public sector has been partially reformed by creating technical and vocational authorities at provincial level.

However, this vital sector is anachronistic with the job market requirement and needs of the enterprises. In the past, several polytechnic institutions were established with the collaboration of developed countries which not only helped in setting up the institutes but also sent senior staff to manage them for some time.

Degenerate law and order situation and forceful entry of student politics soon paralysed these seats of learning. In a horrifying accident some years ago, the European principal of a joint venture institute was shot dead in broad day light in Karachi. Growing intolerance and declining ability of the government has adversely affected the normal running of institutions. Riots, political skirmishes and resulting closures of educational institutions brew frustration amongst the ranks of positive minded young people. Unless the government does not strictly enforce order and restore peace in campuses, the youth will continue to suffer.

More than 39 million young and adolescent women constitute the swelling youth protuberance in Pakistan. They can be marked as the most deprived and vulnerable section of the population. Growing intolerance towards women folk, reduction in social status by design, governmental impotence towards ensuring rights to live and shrinking spaces — even for biological existence — are some of the growing menaces for our young womenfolk. Chances to basic literacy are reduced to half when compared to male counterparts.

Malnourished status and willful neglect towards necessary issues of healthcare make the possibility of healthy survival dwindle each passing day. Armed with the false pretension of morality, the reactionary elements in various parts of the country have created multiple taboos to enslave the basic rights of womenfolk. The political and social environment is becoming suffocated despite hypocritical claims of enlightenment. It is obvious that the regime aims to set aside the burning issues pertinent to this disadvantaged section of youth as no light appears at the end of the tunnel.

Abject poverty and utmost restrictive chances of social mobility affect a sizable segment of young people. Low scale of economic productivity, resourcelessness, lack of adequate support services and absence of monetary or knowledge capital do not allow a substantial number of young people to cross subsistence level in life.

It may be noted that perpetual poverty generates a feeling of helplessness that eventually causes frustration of acute kind. The common attitude of the young people on streets, walkways and other public places clearly depicts this shortcoming through body languages. Feverish marketing of plush life styles by the media has also raised the demands of young people.

High rate of crime, violence, lawlessness and indisciplined behaviour emerge when demands remain unmet. Poverty generates several drastic outcomes. Many young people fall prey to extremist outfits that lure them into violence and terrorism. Spread of social and moral disorders is also a direct outcome. General anarchy in the society intensifies as youth loses faith in laws, systems and codes of conduct. It also causes a massive loss of talent which majority of these young people inherently possess.

To tackle these issues, our government announces projects and programmes meant to create jobs. But this approach has severe limitations of scale and outreach. Even the most powerful and resource laden regime cannot extend direct employment to its entire population. Instead the attempts are geared towards the creation of an enabling environment, removal of inefficiencies (such as lack of infrastructure), reduction of regional disparities, strategic use of subsidies, effective control of corruption (to restore public trust) and generation of a fool proof law and order situation that could channelise human and capital input for corresponding outputs.

Sadly, the regime has betrayed its citizens — especially youth — on every count. Due to ineffective security, poor internal and external policies and selfish safeguard of self interest, more than 10 people, mostly youth, die every day in acts of terrorism. Perception of anarchy and lack of security have risen to such a level that world community has reduced direct participation to a bare minimum. Foreigners from all parts of the world receive advices not to travel to Pakistan. The confusing and most disappointing state of our sports management affairs is a case in point. No one is sure whether Pakistan will be able to access the Olympics given the in fights amongst factions of our sports managers.

Youth is a resource. At present, bulk of the world population is young. Many countries have taken effective measures to deal with problems of this vibrant cross section of the society and have come up with simple but far reaching strategies. For example, Cambodia launched a youth volunteer service to help rural youth increase food productivity by learning appropriate techniques in agriculture. Many other countries have also followed similar approaches. To ensure early productivity, young people are provided multiple choices to acquire skills while at school.

Technical and Vocational Education (TVE), apprenticeship programmes, small scale entrepreneurship, consolidation of work opportunities in informal sector, incentives to prevent dislocation from home towns/settlements, gender specific policies to support young women and creation of financial products by banking sector have all proved useful in helping youth realise their potential and move up the ladder of social mobility. Unabated development and sustenance of physical and social infrastructure is also vital to help marginalised and less advantaged youth utilise its capacity for economic productivity.
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17.11.2013
“Reliance on foreign aid can’t ensure child rights”
The United Nations (UN) Universal Children’s Day is celebrated on November 20 each year to promote international togetherness and awareness among children worldwide. TNS spoke to Anees Jillani, veteran child rights activist and founding member of SPARC (Society for the Protection of the Rights of Child). An advocate of the Supreme Court, he has also authored a book “Child Labour: The Legal Aspects”.
By Waqar Gillani


TNS: How do you see the situation of children’s rights in Pakistan?

Anees Jillani: Approximately half of Pakistan’s population consists of children who are defined internationally as someone below the age of 18 years. If you take out the under-five who are not of school going age, then majority are not going to school. A country with an uneducated lot cannot progress and compete in the international arena.

The situation is more acute in some regions as opposed to the others. For instance, it is quite bad in the tribal areas, and then generally with reference to girls. In rural areas 65 per cent of Pakistan’s populace faces the brunt of this bleak situation.

Even if children go to school, they hardly learn anything substantial and whatever they do is seldom useful in the national context. Most of the time, it is outdated.

Majority of Pakistan’s population is poor and resultantly their children are malnourished. As a result, the physical and mental growth of such children is compromised and many die young. The infant mortality rate in Pakistan is one of the highest in the world.

The sad part is that the state is oblivious to all these difficulties and hardly even taking the first step to solve these innumerable problems faced by children.

It is unclear as to what you mean by major child abuses. I would categorise child labour as child abuse. Similarly, child sexual abuse continues to take place both against boys and girls. Abuse of girls below the age of 18 is rampant in our red-light areas and it is common to use under-age children for purposes of prostitution. Some are trafficked even to the Gulf countries.

TNS: How do you compare the child rights situation of Pakistan to the rest of the world? How different it is from developed nations and how close it is to other developing countries?

AJ: Comparing the situation with the developed world will be ironical as the children there enjoy a whole lot of rights which are absent in our country. These rights range from covering health, education, entertainment, protection from abuse and respect.

The situation of Pakistan’s children is not good even when compared with those in other South Asian countries. The literacy rate of India, despite a much greater population, is higher and the quality is better. India is a poor country but it is moving towards fighting child labour. There are a number of state sponsored authorities working to protect child rights. In the whole of Pakistan, there is not a single such authority or commission functioning. Children need recreation and entertainment to grow as healthy individuals. They are not to be seen in Pakistan. It is common to see children playing cricket on the roads. We have failed to even provide them simple grounds where they can play, which is not a costly proposition.

TNS: Where does Pakistan stand vis-a-vis international treaties and UN conventions on children rights? And what is the status of the implementation and practicing of these conventions?

AJ: Pakistan has signed and ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which frankly is not a big deal as with the exception of three countries, all have done so. What Pakistan has failed to do is to follow the spirit of this convention and adopt and implement its provisions in letter and spirit. It is expected to file reports regarding its compliance every five years. So far, it has filed only three reports; and with the exception of the first one, the remaining two were filed after a delay of several years. The third one was delayed so much that the committee entrusted with the task to review it had to ask Pakistan to combine its third and fourth report. Now the fifth one is already delayed by a year as it was due to be filed in December 2012.

Similarly, Pakistan signed two key ILO Conventions dealing with child labour during the Musharraf era and ratified them later. Not much has been done regarding their implementation in the country. What our policy-makers fail to realise is that it is in our interests to follow these conventions and do something for our children.

Others may or may not be sincere in criticising us but the most they can do is to provide us with guidance and show us the way. Foreign assistance is not the answer as the number of children is huge. More importantly, developed countries did not solve these problems through foreign aid but through their own efforts.

TNS: What is the status of full implementation of JJSO (Juvenile Justice System Ordinance) and juvenile courts and rehabilitation centres in the country?

AJ: The JJSO was introduced in 2000 but not a single exclusive juvenile court has been established during the past 13 years. Existing courts have been given powers through notifications to also assume powers of juvenile courts which does not serve the purpose. The Ordinance expects the juvenile courts to function in a particular fashion and respect the right of privacy of the accused children. The existing courts assuming powers to handle cases of juveniles does not serve such a purpose.

The Ordinance also requires the cases to be decided within a period of four months which is seldom done. The police while arresting a juvenile defined as anyone below the age of 18 years fail to follow the procedure given in the law.

TNS: What is Pakistan’s status in term of framing laws related to child rights and their violations?

AJ: There are no laws relating to child rights in Balochistan. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa adopted its first law on this subject in 2010 and passed a law dealing with establishing special prisons for children only in 2012. Punjab passed a law in 2004 which is now being partly implemented. Prior to this, there were two laws which were never notified to come into force. Sindh took 19 years to notify its 1955 Act to come into force and there are hardly any noteworthy steps taken to even do justice to this Act.

The 18th Amendment has not really affected the issue of child rights as the subject was within the domain of the provinces even prior to it. The major confusion it has created is with regard to the responsibility within the federal ministries in relation to compliance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

It has also made it difficult to enact national laws like the JJSO dealing with the issue. However, there is no stopping the provinces from enacting their own laws.

TNS: There is always a justification for child labour, both commercial and domestic, in Pakistan relating it to the economy. To what extent this debate is justified? What is the role of state in this regard?

AJ: Eidul Azha just passed. Roughly speaking, more than 10 million people offered Qurbani. If each such person spent a minimum of Rs20,000 on the Qurbani, which is likely to be more and not less, the total spent on just Qurbani during the Eid comes to a staggering amount of Rs200,000,000,000. Do you think Pakistan would have had any poor people left and we have had any child labour left in the country if just this amount one time alone had been spent to alleviate and eliminate poverty from Pakistan? Instead, we look towards the donors to solve our poverty-related problems while we all prepare for the life hereafter. The presence of corruption is yet another proof of our sincerity even in this endeavour.

The point I am trying to make above is that the country has resources. We are not a poor country. The resources are divided unevenly. The rich are unwilling to share with the ‘have-nots’ and just throw them crumbs from time to time. Child labourers work due to poverty but they will never be able to alleviate the suffering of their families. They themselves will remain poor all their lives. The state has to intervene to break this vicious cycle.

TNS: There are different reports citing an increase in child rights violation in Pakistan, especially child sexual abuse? What are the factors behind it and how can this be controlled at government and social levels?

AJ: Child sexual abuse is prohibited under the Pakistan Penal Code 1860. However, there is a need to improve upon these provisions and make them more child friendly. It should be made easier for abused children to testify in the courts without their privacy being compromised.

The reasons behind child sexual abuse are many. However, more cases are coming to our attention due to growing population and the expansion of media. Pornography on the internet, including social media, and Indian movies are also to be blamed.

TNS: Do you think parents are giving due attention to their children in term of giving awareness about their rights, abuses? If not, what are their responsibilities?

AJ: The upper and middle class parents treat their children as flowers but in their own fashion, usually the way they were raised by their parents. The poor constituting the majority hardly worry about it as survival is the foremost priority for them and not raising children.

What is common amongst all the parents in Pakistan is not respecting the rights of their children and giving them respect. Their voice should be counted and they should be encouraged to participate in all decisions affecting the family particularly those relating to them.

TNS: Where does our curriculum stand in teaching and creating awareness about child rights at school and college level? What type of changes do we need to address this issue?

AJ: The curriculum is silent on this issue. The basic postulate relating to child rights is that ‘human rights are child rights’. In other words, children are as human as all of us and thus enjoy exactly the same rights. These rights should be respected and this fact must be covered in the curriculum. Thus, the curriculum can be made interesting and relevant for the children.

TNS: Is there any national level commission on status of children?

AJ: There is no national commission on child rights. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to establish such a commission now after the 18th Amendment. However, there is no stopping the provinces from establishing such commissions at the provincial level. In 2011, Sindh established a Child Protection Authority but it has yet to be made functional. In 2010, KP passed a law which envisaged a similar Child Protection Authority, but the establishment is awaited. The 2004 law in Punjab talked about establishing a Child Protection Bureau, but it is again not active. Balochistan, Gilgit-Baltistan and Kashmir continue to lack any legislation what to talk of any authority or commission relating to child rights.

vaqargillani@gmail.com
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