A prudent approach, not a myopic vision

A few days ago, the administration in Islamabad announced its doorstep service initiative to facilitate the inhabitants of the capital to ensure efficient and reliable delivery of various documents, like birth and death certificates, vehicle registration, international driving permit, etc. The initiative deserves to be praised as the issuance of such government documents is a real ordeal for the people because of long queues, unnecessary procedures, attestations and red-tapism of the highest order.
Having said that, the initiative stands in stark contrast to the long queues of the have-nots of society writhing all day long in front of Utility Stores to purchase basic food items. Many have received injuries while being part of restless crowds around mobile sale points selling flour bags at subsidised rates. Indeed, more than a dozen have lost their lives in stampede that resulted out of sheer desperation among those waiting for free distribution of flour bags.
The very sight of women waiting early in the morning for Utility Stores to open is as depressing as it is tragic. The most miserable are the ones who return home empty-handed several hours later, wondering what they would give their children to eat.
In desperation, some of them even start running after the vehicles that are loaded with flour bags, risking their lives.
Students of this socioeconomic stratum skip classes to stand in such queues; either they themselves wait for their turn to buy household commodities, or, if they are minors, they wait for their father who is mostly doing labour at a distance because the daily wage is the only means to sustain their life.
Their whole life is out of gear in these testing times; testing only for them, not for the people who live in Islamabad as they would now be getting even government documents at their doorstep.
Children of the impoverished lot spend the whole day at their respective schools without any breakfast as both their parents are ‘out for the hunt’. They are severely malnourished as they hardly get two meals a day. For them, existence on this only inhabitable planet of the universe so far is nothing less than a misery.
According to the staff undertaking the national population census, they find only children at home in slums who tell that their father has left for work and the mother has promised them to fetch food from somewhere. Even some families deemed these staff as people sent by the government to deliver them cash or food. Some families declined to cooperate with them, insisting that they be provided something to eat first.
The stop-gap measures of providing subsidised commodities to the poor through special relief packages in installments reeks of myopic vision of the policymakers who take poverty as an individual problem even though exhaustive research has suggested that it is basically a structural problem.
Additionally, politicians never miss a chance to capitalise on people’s woes and misery to inflate their support base by franchising relief packages using their party name or the name of their party leaders. It is an irrefutable fact that poverty is a man-made issue, not a natural phenomenon. The leadership must recognise that political unrest causes poverty. It is not the other way around.
Is it being utopian to believe that impoverished people need to have access to such doorstep services as well so that they may buy the bare necessities of life right outside their door?
Life can sustain without registration certificates, but surely not without food.
M NADEEM NADIR
KASUR