Pakistan in Media

Urban environments across the country are eating the people that live in them. Every day there are reports of people falling into open sewers, down manholes, being electrocuted by wires trailing from live poles or simply dying of diseases they have picked up from contaminated water. The numbers of people who die in this manner is uncounted, and press reports of their demise are almost certainly the tip of a large iceberg. The responsibility for these deaths, most of them accidents rather than deliberate attempts to harm, is often difficult to apportion. Ours is a culture where nobody is ever responsible for anything anyway, but there are clearly instances where fault can and should be apportioned and the guilty parties taken to task. A spate of deaths of children in Karachi, drowned in undrained rainwater ponds, is a case in point.

The most recent is of a six-year and an eight-year old who died in a rainwater pond close to the Super Highway where, according to local sources, at least five other children have died in the last month. There are several similar ponds in the same area, others in Korangi and Surjani. These are not ‘hidden threats’, they are there for all to see. Children are naturally inquisitive and often unaware of the risks presented by stretches of open water. They have no depth-perception as the water is clouded and it is all too easy for them to slip or fall and quickly get into difficulty. Whilst parents have a primary duty of care to ensure that their children come to no harm, it is unrealistic to expect every child to be watched every minute of every day. At some point children have to go out into the world, at which point the responsibility of those who manage the world these children come out into becomes more important. Where there is such an obvious hazard as the rainwater ponds, with an established and well-documented record of taking young lives, it amounts to criminal negligence on the part of the city authorities not to drain them and level the land.
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