Littering penalty

Making littering a jailable offence also opens up avenues for the infamous police forces to extort bribes

Just a day after the Sindh government banned littering, spitting, and open waste disposal in Karachi, the police on Thursday arrested a man for throwing garbage in a street in District Malir. The police said they made the arrest after receiving a complaint about a citizen dumping garbage on a street. The ban is being enforced using Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC). Anyone found violating Section 144 in this regard would be prosecuted under Section 188 of the Pakistan Penal Code, which relates to disobeying official orders issued by a public servant. The penalties range from the one month in jail and a fine of Rs200 to a maximum of six months imprisonment and a fine of Rs1,000, depending on the degree of violation. The ban, which is part of the city’s latest cleanliness campaign, includes rewards of up to Rs100,000 for anyone who films people who throw garbage on the streets of Karachi, according to Sindh Information Minister Saeed Ghani, who also accused unnamed political parties of conspiring to sabotage the cleanliness drive.

While enhanced punishments for littering are welcome, penalties carrying jail time for littering are rare around the world. Most cities and countries do opt for heavy fines, which are easily enforceable and don’t additionally burden the public exchequer with the cost of care for a prisoner. Even Singapore, with its famously harsh anti-littering laws, only has financial penalties beginning at SGD1,000 (Rs113,524) and capped at SGD5,000 (Rs567,621), along with community service punishments, namely cleaning public places. Making littering a jailable offence also opens up another avenue for our infamously unscrupulous police forces to extort bribes from lawbreakers and even innocent people, because ‘evidence’ would be notoriously easy to plant. A better approach may have been to use significantly heavier fines. Finding a balance on the fine amounts may be tricky, but solutions include significantly enhancing the maximum fine for repeat offences and adding categories that penalise wealthy offenders more heavily. 

Published in The Express Tribune, September 28^th, 2019.

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