Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [167]
Literacy in Faisalabad is still between 40 and 50 per cent according to the city government. This is a grotesque figure for a city and region that hopes to become an industrial giant of Asia, and one that reflects both the historic failings of repeated Pakistani and Punjabi governments and the cultural attitudes of the local population – above all when it comes to education for women.
Faisalabad was founded in 1880 as Lyallpur, and named after the then British Governor of the Punjab. It was renamed Faisalabad in 1977 after the late King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, who had displayed considerable generosity to Pakistan. Like the town of Montgomery (now Sahiwal) to the south, it was created by the British as the commercial and administrative centre of one of their new canal colonies, on what had previously been an almost uninhabited area of arid jungle and semi-desert. Patches of this still remain, where either the canals never reached or salination has destroyed the land’s fertility again.
The original town was laid out in the shape of a Union Jack, with streets radiating from a central clock-tower, in a sort of Victorian gothicsaracenic style. In 1902 it still only had 9,000 people, but thereafter the growth of commercial farming and cotton cultivation, South Asia’s great tradition of textile production, and the settlement of east Punjabi refugees after 1947 led to explosive growth. Today, the city has almost 3 million people and the district more than 5 million – and, being Faisalabad, these statistics may even be accurate. A large proportion of the population – some say a majority – are east Punjabis who replaced local Hindus and Sikhs who fled in 1947. Faisalabad is therefore, partly at least, another example of the economic dynamism of these migrants, even while it also reflects their cultural conservatism.
Faisalabad’s municipal government is home to a strategic policy unit, the only effective city institution of its kind (so far as I know) outside Karachi, the leaders of which seemed models of efficiency and dedication. With the help of GHK, a British-based public policy consultancy, and assistance (now alas ended) from the British Department for International Development (DIFID), the unit has developed a number of new projects to revolutionize the city’s administration and provision of services. Its work is based largely on a mixture of satellite imaging of the district backed by an intensive programme of local inspection. As a result, for the first time the government is developing an accurate picture of the city, the spread of population, the provision of services, and so on.
Perhaps most importantly, as Gul Hafeez Khokar of GHK told me, it is now possible at the click of a mouse to see whether a planned road or school has actually been built or not: ‘This is a check on corruption, because the city government can now check immediately whether a planned road has been built, or the money stolen. And on the other hand, if it has been built, then it doesn’t need to be commissioned all over again – something that happens all the time in Pakistan.’
The digital map will allow more efficient provision of services, and hopefully prevent disasters like that of 2007 in a Faisalabad slum when local community pressure on the politicians led to the city government increasing the flow through water pipes to the area. Because it had no idea how many pipes were actually there, it increased the pressure too much and burst the pipes. The result was an outbreak of gastro-enteritis in which several dozen people died. Until the digital mapping project started, the government could not even properly tax gas stations in the city, because it did not know how many there were. It is possible to see all this when the computers are working; but, when I was there, they were not,