Five years later

PESHAWAR/ABBOTTABAD/MUZAFFARABAD: Five years later, the memories of the October 8 earthquake remain alive.

“Memories of the earthquake are not a thing of the past for me. It seems like it happened yesterday,” said resident Javed Iqbal from Balakot city in Mansehra district.

Balakot was a city of around 20,000 people, and on that fateful day it lost around 14,000 of its inhabitants. It is reported that around 2,400 school children were dead in less than an hour and about 5,000 were injured as nearly 300 schools were destroyed.

“People weep when they meet each other on October 8,” Iqbal said, adding that the bazaars remain closed on the day and people visit graveyards to offer prayers for their loved ones.  Later, the residents of the area go for a recitation of the Holy Quran at the town’s main mosque and jointly pray for the dead at exactly 8:52 am, he said.

Manzoor Hussain, a local journalist who still has vivid visions of the earthquake, recalls that they were unable to see anything for a minute just after the tremors started. “People started saying that the city had been bombed from the air as thick fumes of dust enveloped the city,” he said. There were cries of the injured and those who have lost their families echoing all around, bodies scattered everywhere. The living city became a necropolis for its residents, he added.

The Earthquake Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Authority (Erra) has completed only 49 per cent of the projects that had been planned.

According to Erra’s records, 12,929 infrastructure projects were planned when the 7.6-magnitude earthquake shook parts of northern Pakistan. Of these, 6,336 projects have been completed in five years. As many as 4,381 are still in the process of design.A total of  2,207 projects have had to be scrapped due to financial constraints.

A project, worth Rs100 million has been launched for the rehabilitation of Old Balakot City at Bakrial, while a project named New Balakot City that was announced by former president Pervez Musharraf to relocate the inhabitants of the town, still lies incomplete. The city was to be built on 21,000 kanals of land at an estimated cost of Rs13 billion.

“Even the land for building a new city could not be acquired… and there are doubts it will ever happen,” an official from Erra told The Express Tribune.

The rebuilding of infrastructure like water supply, sanitation, roads and bridges is also in a shambles both in Balakot and AJK, locals said. “There hasn’t been any progress we can call substantial,” said Muhammad Arshad Khan from Balakot. He lost his house in the tragedy and is still living in a makeshift structure provide to him by the Saudi government. People in the town are living in around 5,200 shelters provided by Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, the State Earthquake Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Agency (Serra) said it has completed the construction of 2,936 projects in the earthquake-stricken areas of Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) during the last three years, while work is in progress on another 2,606 projects that mainly include schools.

“Houses of 98 per cent of the survivors have been completed,” head of Serra Choudhary Liaquat Hussain said, adding that the disaster affected 1,800,000 people, more than half of AJK’s total population.

However, the AJK government, Erra and Serra faces growing protests and criticism in the area for not starting development projects in the capital city. Trade organisations in Muzaffarabad and Bagh have announced that they will go on a strike on the eve on the earthquake’s anniversary to protest the non-implementation of development projects, while Tameer Nou Muzaffarabad has threatened to lead a “long march” towards Islamabad to protest the delay in reconstruction. Traders not a part of these organisations have however announced to keep their businesses running.

Education sector

In Abbottabad district, Erra was tasked with the reconstruction of more than 250 school buildings. The buildings, which were either partially or completely damaged, were never built and construction materials were sold in the market. Classes were moved to either damaged tents or out in the open.

To date, Rs1.06 billion have been spent on the education sector. Thirty-eight per cent of the 569 projects have been completed, while 301 projects are under construction.District Reconstruction Unit, Abbottabad, Programme Manager told The Express Tribune that it was highly likely that all those projects that were in the tendering stage will not be started.

Published in The Express Tribune October 8^th, 2010.