Slave Drivers and Street Vendors

While driving through Empress Road a petrifying scene attracted my attention that compelled me to pull up and watch over. It was really shocking. In a ding-dong fight the City officials were veritably frittering away the victuals and seizing the pushcarts of the luckless vendors. Under the supervision of a petty official behaving like a dummy god of the City government, the economic and physical assault of the vendors, destroyed their dignity and conviction only for being unlicensed.

The view reminded me of such instances as hackneyed during apartheid or colonial regimes. It clinched an argument that the same Pakistan that is earnestly engaged in war against terrorism, at street level follows Machiavelli.

City officials regularly quell vendors to mental and physical pressures. At times this has led to riotous situations, loss of property, and monetary damage. A major problem is that master plans prepared for our cities do not collocate space to vendors. The planners blindly imitate the western concept of marketing, ignoring our traditions and the needs of the unemployed youth, particularly in the wake of rising crime and terrorism. No wonder, weekly markets struggle to survive; natural markets are ignored. The policy statements of the local, provincial and federal development authorities talk of making provision for trading and commercial activities, which unfortunately is interpreted as doing so for rich traders and big businesses.

We have taken no notice of the ignorance of City workers, their misuse of authority and inadequacy. Consequently, their treachery, lust, covetousness, and every kind of inhumanity and cruelty, continue unabated.

Street vendors are those millions who come to cities as economic refugees hoping to provide basic necessities for their families. They provide a wide array of commodities to the urban populace at reasonable prices. They can be divided into two major categories—(a) mobile vendors who own pushcarts or simply move around with their goods in hand and (b) stallholders who set up khokhas in public places on a more or less regular basis.

The variety seen in the goods and, yes, the services provided by these innovative professionals is staggering. It is difficult not to associate these people with the culture and traditions of the city.

The type of goods they sell makes an interesting study – from daily needs like vegetable, fruits, fish, meat and snacks to occasional needs like ready-to-eat food, toys, and used garments. It would be hard to find an urbanite that doesn’t purchase something from these vendors. The middle and lower class consumer specifically prefers to purchase from them, though even well heeled citizens purchase many commodities given reasonable prices.

Vending has been a profession since time immemorial, with street vendors an integral part of our urban history and culture. Shopping and marketing, in a traditional sense, has primarily been informal. Social interaction is integral to our markets in contrast to the mechanized and sterile concept of shopping favored by modern market and super market structures.

Street vendors exhibit remarkable entrepreneurial skills. Purchasing of commodities is no easy task with constant market fluctuations. Merchandise has to be in sync with both consumer tastes and paying capacity. As most vendors deal in perishables, the goods have to be sold at the right time.

The municipal corporation laws, based on 19th century British rule, are outdated and detrimental to the peaceful conduct of business by vendors. Instead of regulating vendors, city governments treat them as a nuisance; their policies and actions are aimed more at removing and harassing them rather than at regulation. The rich traders have encroached sidewalks, footpaths and even roads, which the same authorities ignore. Why? The law only seems for the poor who are unable to grease the palms of the incompetent functionaries.

Every government in Pakistan comes with tall claims for poverty alleviation but unemployment continues to exist. Street or sidewalk vending provides self-employment and small business ownership opportunities to the downtrodden. Entrepreneurship is an exciting opportunity for the poor to realize their full potential while becoming financially self-supporting. Our planners remain oblivious to the role of vendors who are victimized, harassed, marginalized and deprived.

The city has today become an engine of growth, the main job provider. Just the same, they remain ill prepared to address the problems of poverty. Planning and governance continues to be the preserve of the politician-mafia-bureaucrat nexus. Poorly tailored policies if at all exist are badly implemented. Instead of creating an enabling environment, government policies are wrecking the livelihoods of these people, depressing their incomes and thwarting their entrepreneurial potential.

There is unabated official and social hostility towards the informal sector of street vending, even though the formal sector has ceased to grow, having reached saturation point. As the cost of creating jobs in this sector is very low, it needs to be integrated into the context of the overall macro-economy. However, we must first remove the obstacles in its functioning.

There is no institutionalization of a process to enable vendors to sell their commodities peacefully. A holistic approach targeting all the stakeholders demands changes in anti-vendor laws, a pro-vendor policy, creation of institutions to enable participation of vendors in urban governance, changing the mindset of the planners, the police and the society at large, and building the capacity of the vendors.

Pakistan’s social system must cater to the needs of its members to enable them to survive; it must have effective means of allocating and distributing resources. The government should thus formulate a policy by (a) giving vendors legal status and issuing licenses at nominal yearly fee, (b) setting up of mobile teams for spot licensing (c) promoting and developing the natural market system, (d) making street vendors a special component of the plans for urban development by treating them as an integral part of the urban distribution system, (e) setting up appropriate, participative, non-formal mechanisms with representation from street vendors, NGOs, local authorities, the police and others. Asif J. Mir, Organizational Transformation

Water Crisis and Smart Consumption

Fresh water is a life support. Yet over the past half-century the scale and pace of human influences on freshwater systems has accelerated rapidly, along with population and consumption growth. Worldwide water demands roughly tripled.

Pakistan ranks 20th in water resources, 127th out of 142 countries in water availability and 24th out of 140 in severe water stress. Water availability per person in Pakistan today is 1,000 cubic meters, down from 5,600 cubic meters per person in 1947.

Water tables are falling in Pakistan from over-pumping of groundwater. Pakistan has the highest per capita water consumption in the region because of inefficient use. It ranks 8th from amongst 209 countries in groundwater withdrawals. Major rivers now run dry for portions of the year. The impacts of rising water consumption are increasingly visible.

Pakistan has large dams with Tarbela is 5th and Mangla 15th largest in world. For a time, only the benefits of these engineering projects were registered—not their social and ecological costs, in terms of people displaced from their homes, fisheries destroyed, soils contaminated by salts, and aquatic species imperiled. Mangla Dam would silt up in 10 to 15 years.

Pakistan has the 14th highest per capita consumption of water in the world. As much as 97 percent of its water goes to feed its agriculture sector, which is very high. Pakistan’s water table is falling and wells are now being dug deeper and deeper which is not only bringing up salinity but also drying up wells that were shallower.

The exploitation of fossil water in the southern Baluchistan can lead to a disaster. Water is not found until a depth of 1,000 ft is reached in parts of Baluchistan, reflecting that the water table is declining rapidly. The levels of Baluchistan's underground aquifers are dropping at a rate of 3.5 meters annually, and will run out in 15 years, resulting in massive internal displacements.

There are some trends that make the regulation of water resources a much greater need today than it was in the past. The first of these is population growth. Currently the population is 144 million and projected to increase to 260 million by 2050. Added to this, the per capita consumption of water in Pakistan is the highest in the region, due to inefficient use. Urbanization from 1970 to 1994 has increased by 7 percent putting more stress on the resources of cities. Problems are emerging. Water supply development is also reaching its limits. The wells are being dug deeper and deeper, drying up the other wells that are shallower. The Mangla dam may become inoperative in 10 to 15 years time because of silting, and no new large dam is being built.

The most urgent task is to provide all people with at least the minimum amount of clean water and sanitation needed for good health. Yet the large gap in coverage worldwide has almost nothing to do with water scarcity. Globally, providing universal access to 50 liters per person per day by 2015 would require less than 1 percent of current global water withdrawals. There is more than enough water, but so far the political will and financial commitments to provide the poor with access to it have not been sufficient.

Raising the productivity of agricultural water use is critical to meeting people’s food needs as water stress deepens and spreads. In Pakistan agriculture is using 95 percent of our total water, the remaining four to five percent for drinking and industrial use. Of the 565,000 total tube wells in Pakistan, nearly 70 percent are now pumping hard water or saline water, because sweet water has been exhausted. If the drought persists for a year or so, it will mean that there will be more pressure on these tube wells.

To raise the productivity of water, it will be necessary to deliver and apply water to crops more efficiently and to increase crop yields per liter of water consumed. This can be done by using drip-sprinklers and other micro-irrigation systems, changing cropping patterns and growing methods to get more crop per drop, and adopting high-yielding and early-maturing crop varieties. Shifting diets, too, will enable people to satisfy nutritional needs with less water. It takes five times more water to supply 10 grams of protein from beef than from rice, and nearly 20 times more water to supply 500 calories from beef.

There is no mystery about why so much of the water extracted for human use is wasted and mismanaged: the policies that drive water decisions in most cases foster inefficiency and misallocation rather than conservation and sustainable use.

Achieving an optimal balance between meeting human needs and protecting valuable ecosystem functions requires allocating sufficient water throughout the year to sustain those functions. Setting limits on the use of rivers and other freshwater ecosystems is the key to sustainable economic progress because it protects the ecosystems underpinning the economy while spurring improvements in water productivity.

The government should fulfill the obligation to protect the public trust in water by passing laws and regulations that safeguard vital ecosystem functions. It ought to institute groundwater regulations. It also needs to promote more efficient and equitable use of water by using tiered water pricing—where the unit price of water to a user increases along with the volume used. It should restrict water use when necessary—for instance, when river flows drop to low levels. It should also develop markets for water to improve the efficiency of use and allocation. The ability to trade water can help reallocate available supply and encourages users to conserve, because they can sell saved water for extra income.

Pakistan must plan for a sustainable and secure society meeting its water needs without destroying the ecosystems upon the prospects of future generations. (www.asifjmir.com)