Disposable childhoods

From the moment a Pakistani child draws its first breath, authorities and society look the other way. From hospitals to schools and madrassas to workshops, children in this country are treated like disposable cutlery - used, tossed aside and forgotten.

Take Lahore General Hospital where a newborn just a couple of days back had been abducted from right under the nose of the staff, guards and administrators who looked on as a bunch of statues bolted to the floor. Not by any cinematic masterminds having high-tech gadgets at their disposal. Not through any great plan but by two women who saw holes – wide enough to march through – in the hospital's handover system and may have greased the palms of underpaid, indifferent staff. That's it. That's all it took for a baby to vanish while those tasked with protecting the littlest and most vulnerable ended up as lifeless dummies in uniform. What does it say about us when kidnapping from a hospital is safer than childbirth itself?

Let's say a child dodges abduction; the following spin of the roulette is health. Karachi - home to more than 20 million souls and the supposed economic engine - runs on empty, unable to provide enough PICU or NICU beds. Parents cradle gasping babies in their arms and keep pleading for a place while officials wave budget files and boast of increased allocations. What good are allocations if they never make it to bedside? Where does this money go? Into the black hole of corruption, into the pockets of middlemen, into the safes of bureaucrats, anywhere but the wards where babies die in lines waiting for oxygen.

Let the child survive abduction and our hospitals. Then comes the abuse of the classroom and the madrassa - spaces far too often places of fear than institutions meant to inspire learning. They seem to subscribe to the same lunatic mantra 'Break their spirit'. Reports of children, too poor to fight back, being beaten to death, slapped, humiliated and 'disciplined' by teachers - draped in respectability - aren't occasional tragedies; they're daily rituals. A neighbour of mine sent his two sons to a madrassa not just for learning the Quran but because he couldn't feed them. He handed them over to men who (most of them) confuse iron rule with discipline. One can only hope his boys don't inherit the poison chalice dressed up as education.

And If they survive abduction, hospital negligence and abusive frontline teachers, they will end up working as labourers. More than 1.6 million children in Sindh upper the age of 10 and lower than 17 are engaged in labour. Half of these children are working under very adverse conditions. Long hours, dangerous machines, toxic environments, hauling loads heavier than themselves - all while being underpaid and unfed. Welcome to the Pakistani childhood! What they do is what contributes so much; the teeming millions offered in service to our comfort at low prices. Would we approve for our children what we accept for these children?

Authorities, on the other hand, are too busy drafting hollow policies or thumping their chests in donor-funded conferences. They act like blind men in a burning house: bumping into walls, pretending they smell nothing, ignoring the flames licking their feet. The justice system has collapsed into farce while children choke, bleed and vanish before our eyes. They just don't count in a political and judicial culture that kneels only to power and profit.

Every abduction, every shortage, every bruise from a teacher's stick, every child buried after working with unsafe tools is on the hands of the government, the justice system, even the society that continues to normalise it.

Go on, authorities and society. Keep it up! Your record is spotless: spotless in cruelty, spotless in apathy, spotless in failure.