City’s urban failure results in occupation by rats

Private housing schemes have given birth to problem

PESHAWAR:

Rats, like many other problems faced by Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, have existed for a long time. They had bitten children and even killed several others in the past, but nobody bothered about where they were coming from and why they have increased in numbers in recent years.

The impression is that the rodents landed from another planet to plague the streets of the city in an intergalactic conspiracy. Like terrorism, the rats are symbols of our collective apathy and reflect how we look away from the real problem. It is not rocket science to decipher the code of a failed urban policy that has led to this point. The affected areas, where the number of rats has now stretched beyond the human population – at least in the public imagination – are all located by the side of canals and were once agricultural lands, but not anymore.

Without planning

The entire strip leading from Warsak Road to Charsadda Road and beyond, as well the canal that runs parallel to it and cuts through areas of Bashirabad, is where many cases of rat bites have surfaced.

But the rodents have not emerged suddenly. They have been there for a long time. The only things that are new are the mushrooming private housing schemes. Although these schemes satisfy the immediate need of providing basic shelter to an ever-increasing population of the city, they present examples of unplanned urbanisation with little to offer in terms of sanitation and cleanliness.

Since these are not government-owned lands, there is hardly any mechanism that keeps checks on the subnormal living conditions of locals.



The population of these areas mostly include people who have migrated for economic purposes and IDPs from tribal areas who can neither afford land in the main city nor are used to living in more urbanised constructions. Therefore, the comparative cheap accommodation with a self-styled building is a cheap bargain in accordance with the demand.

In leftover lands

The fields are disappearing and so is the natural habitat of whatever survived within those fields. Both humans and rats are battling for their survival. With hardly any knowledge on building codes, malpractices in the process to get projects approved and above all no plan for cleanliness, this was bound to happen.

What is even funnier is the way everything is politicised. The Peshawar district administration’s cheap take of announcing “head-money” for rats — the same failed colonial methods to control the increasing population of cobras and mice — is not just ludicrous but shows the immaturity of the people we elect to office, and their lack of understanding of the very areas they are asked to govern.

Experts have even suggested that the rodents, whose size is well beyond six to eight inches, are either genetically mutated or cross breeds. Even if that is true, it reflects a failure at the policy level because residents of Peshawar have hardly ever heard of fumigation in the city (which is now called the ‘anti-rat campaign’) prior to the increasing number of victims of rat bites.

Old becomes new

Since the campaign has begun, there have been more than 300 cases treated at the hospitals. I am pretty sure there were cases reported before that. But there was no official data on them and they were probably not considered a problem.

So, will the incumbent government live with mythologising Peshawar as the sister city of Hamelin in Germany or will it actually go into the root-cause of the problem?  One can only hope that governance issues become real and are not just public relations campaigns that bring no relief to the residents for whom the system was put in place in first place.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 4^th, 2016.