Islands of hope

It was in October 1999 when the creator of Comilla and the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP), Dr Akhter Hameed Khan (AHK), left us. As the state had neglected to implement a meaningful poverty eradication strategy in the past 63 years, some visionaries set out to create ‘Islands of Hope’ for the poor. This is the title of the book being launched in Islamabad on October 25 by the Akhter Hameed Khan Resource Centre — a selection of AHK’s own writings as well as contributions in his honour. The title captures his action-oriented vision: “Pakistan’s development will not come from the top, it will come from the bottom, and it will happen in pockets — one island formed here, one there and one island will be made by you.”

AHK declassed his living into the image of a Sufi saint and cultivated his mind to the joys of poetry. Intezar Hussain’s essay describes AHK’s poetry as his sanctum. But the poem opening the book, translated by friend Khaled Ahmed, suggests the opposite: “For long I have collected bricks/and heard the rebuke of failure/but when the evening falls a voice tells me/this vale is soon to be prosperous.”

A narrative by Hamid Khan, AHK’s brother, sets the stage by giving a flavour of the socio-cultural milieu in which he lived and worked before partition. This was the time of the Bengal famine, the study of which led to Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s abiding pursuit of the idea of justice. The injustice in distribution system led to AHK’s resignation from the Indian Civil Service.

AHK’s diaries, put together under the title of “Floods and famine in Bengal”, provide further insights on the link between poverty and injustice. The book includes AHK’s revisits to the Comilla and OPP experiments. Arif Hasan’s meticulous documentation of the replication of the OPP concludes with the lament that “despite the government’s sanitation policy which promotes the OPP-RTI development model, the paradigm shift that Dr Khan had envisaged for Pakistan has yet to materialise.”

AHK’s struggle to make a difference to the lives of the poor comes into its own in the graphic depiction of the life and times of AHK by his truest disciple, Shoaib Sulltan Khan, who has continued to take his message forward in the expanding network of rural support programmes. AHK is seen reflecting on the stark reality of today: “there is one main feature of Pakistan which is very disturbing, the failure of governance,” typified by the mess that has been made of the irrigation system in Punjab, a job “done competently in the colonial past.” This writer’s contribution spells out the research method of AHK. Dr Nurun Nahar Kabir, current director of the Academy in Comilla, once headed by AHK, argues that his concept of development was inclusive. AHK believed that “the segregation of rural women and their exclusion from economic activities” was not good for growth. Kappula Raju, who was instrumental in applying the ideas of AHK and Shoaib Sultan in Andhra Pradesh, pays the richest tribute that an Indian can pay by describing AHK as a “true Gandhian of the poor, of the past, present and the future.” Out here, he was dragged in courts for alleged blasphemy in his last years.

Pakistan is decades away from achieving the Millennium Development Goals fixed for 2015. ‘Islands of Hope’ have to become, in the words of John Donne, “a piece of the continent, a part of the main” for the country to achieve sustainable human development.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 22^nd, 2010.