Daily Times

There can really be no bigger shame for a nation or its people than infant deaths, by the thousands every year, because of hunger, starvation and malnutrition. What is happening, and has been happening for a very long time, in Tharparkar brings the Islamic Republic of Pakistan just that kind of shame. This month, too, about 30 infants have been lost so far because they couldn’t be given enough food to keep the life in their small, fragile bodies. On average at least 1,000 infants are lost every year in this fashion in the poor suffering district. And every now and then this tragedy becomes all the rage on the media and everybody sheds tears and makes claims yet nothing at all changes on the ground.

Perhaps the ruling party in Sindh, Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), ought to talk a little about this matter, and how it plans to control and compensate for it, as it goes about trying to unseat the present government and allegedly save democracy itself. Why, after running the province as its own fiefdom for such a long time, has it not yet even considered improving the state of medical facilities in a region where issues like malnutrition send thousands of children to the grave year in and year out? How can it even answer for the lavish lifestyle of some of its most senior members while the people that vote them into power live the most miserable lives possible? For even in the best of times they barely get access to any of modern life’s basic facilities, including clean running water.

Even now, as the curse of Tharparkar has once again come to the news cycle, there’s not so much as a whimper from Sindh’s ruling party about it, much less a very sincere effort to tackle this problem, with all the resources available to the province, on war footing. Surely things cannot be left to run the way they are at present. And if the Sindh government is not going to wake up to the extremely urgent necessity of improving health facilities and saving infant lives in Tharparkar, and wherever else this problem exists, then surely some high authority of the state, like the honourable judiciary, must put its foot down and finally intervene; for the sake of those poor children and their suffering parents if not for the state itself. *