Pakistan: A family’s suicide

EDITORIAL: Daily Times

In an act of tragic desperation, an unemployed factory worker has killed himself and his entire family due to the demon of poverty and hunger. The 45-year-old Muhammad Qasim had been unemployed for about five months due to the factory where he worked being closed down because of the frequent gas and electricity load shedding. The factory was located in Faisalabad where many others have also been shut down due to the energy shortage, laying off hundreds of thousands of workers. Taking a gun, he shot dead his wife and five children in their sleep, turning the gun on himself in a final act of desperation. It has been estimated by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) that 1,600 people ended their lives due to mass poverty in 2011, with this number increasing in the following year. These suicides are the very last resort for those thousands upon thousands of people driven to the brink of complete deprivation because of unemployment, inflation and lack of basic facilities. That this particular incident, where one of the children was only a year old, is heartbreaking no doubt, but what is even sadder is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. With millions deprived and the gap between the rich and the poor widening every day, frustration, suicides and crime are all increasing. While the government may have invested time and capital in pro-poor initiatives such as the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP), which has been applauded by even the World Bank, such schemes do not reach every needy person from the massively stricken masses. The energy shortage is typically seen as bothersome, inconvenient and miserable, but this hardly highlights the mammoth unemployment that results because of it, in turn contributing to the deprivation and poverty prevalent in the country. The government’s real fault lies in the fact that it has taken no steps towards fixing this major woe. Short-term measures such as the Rental Power Projects (RPPs) have been struck down and Independent Power Projects (IPPs) will be years in the making. Not much has been done by the authorities to kick-start any energy projects on a war footing. Our vast coal reserves, which promise to be a national treasure for this fuel-starved nation, remain untapped and alternative energy is still in the pilot stage. The collective suicide of this man’s family should serve to wake up those who have the power to resolve the problem although, judging from the track record of the last five years, this seems a fond hope. A couple of years ago, a man set himself on fire in front of parliament to protest against the state of the country’s poor and we stayed callous and aloof. This man and his innocent family may just have died in vain.