Lack of burial space adds to city’s woes

Project of model graveyard in Dhamyal caught in legal issues

RAWALPINDI:

In the wake of deteriorating civic services in the garrison city such as depletion and severe shortage of utilities such as water and gas, the cemeteries of the city are also running short of burial space.

Some 2,000 kanals of land allocated for the model graveyard in Dhamyal exists with a boundary wall around it. However, the land could not be used for interring the dead due to legal issues left by the administration to start the practice.

The Punjab government had allocated Rs300 million in the budget of 2017-18 for developing the Dhamyal graveyard which was supposed to have a morgue at the entrance gate, a transport facility for bringing the body to the distant site from the main city along with plantation across the premises.

However, no progress has been made so far and the administration has turned a blind eye to the issue.

Such apathy and lethargy has ended up in such an abysmal condition that cemeteries across the garrison city have been filled to capacity and there is no more space left to bury the dead in the city.

The gravediggers resort to recycling old graves to make room for new bodies. When a new booking comes, they refurbish old graves which are not visited by relatives.

The unavailability of space for burying the dead has contributed to the rise in the digging rates too which have escalated up to Rs40,000.

The lethargy of the district administration is adding to the miseries of the people who have been left at the mercy of the gravediggers.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 8^th, 2020.