Every Eid-ul-Adha, Pakistan transforms. Streets fill with families, cattle markets come alive for days before the festival and the air carries the particular energy of a celebration observed by tens of millions of people at once. Then comes the aftermath, and with it, one of the most demanding tests any government faces: clearing an enormous volume of sacrificial waste before it becomes a public health crisis.
This year in Punjab, that test was met with unusual force.
Over 72 continuous hours spanning the Eid holidays, more than 184,000 sanitation workers fanned out across the province, through urban neighborhoods and rural communities, along market streets and outside mosques, into areas that larger operations often miss. Temperatures hovered around 45 degrees Celsius. The workers stayed anyway.
By the time the campaign concluded, the Punjab government had collected and disposed of more than 376,000 tonnes of animal waste and refuse. The numbers are almost difficult to picture: 290 cattle markets cleared, 1,278 collective slaughter sites serviced, thousands of Eid grounds and mosques cleaned and washed. More than 40,000 machinery units were deployed alongside vehicle and loader rickshaw fleets. It was, by most measures, one of the largest coordinated sanitation operations the country has seen.
“Suthra Punjab” is the name the provincial government gave to the initiative, and the phrase points to something larger than a single holiday campaign. Under Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif, the administration has invested heavily in the idea that governance can be modernized: that digital tools, real-time data and systematic accountability can change what is possible in public-service delivery. The Eid operation was, in many ways, a stress test of that philosophy.
At the center of the effort was a digital monitoring dashboard that tracked the campaign’s progress across the province in real time. Rather than relying on manual reports that trickled upward through layers of bureaucracy, supervisors and administrators could see where waste collection was falling behind, where resources needed to be redirected and where emerging problems required immediate attention. More than 74,000 users fed operational data into the system, generating over a terabyte of information over the course of the campaign. In selected areas, drone surveillance offered an additional layer of oversight, a tool more commonly associated with tech hubs than with sanitation drives in South Asia.
Citizens, too, were drawn into the operation. More than 41,000 people used the provincial helpline and digital applications to report concerns or seek assistance, a figure that suggests something real about public trust in the system. When ordinary people believe that calling a helpline will produce a result, they call.
The environmental dimension of the campaign was also notable. Twelve million biodegradable waste bags were distributed free of charge, nudging citizens toward responsible disposal. Large quantities of lime, disinfectants and rose water were used to manage hygiene and odor across collection points, practical measures that made a direct difference to comfort and health during the festival. The Punjab government has signaled further ambitions beyond the immediate cleanup: waste-to-energy projects and biogas generation programmes are among the longer-term investments being pursued.
Perhaps the most human gesture of the entire operation came at the end. Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif announced a special cash reward of Rs10,000 for each sanitation worker, on top of their regular salaries. It was an acknowledgment of something that civic operations tend to obscure, that behind every clean street is a person who made it so, often without recognition, often in punishing conditions.
Sanitation workers occupy a peculiar place in public life. Their labor is noticed most when it is absent. The smell of uncollected waste, the flies around a neglected market, the stained ground outside a slaughter site – these register. The person who prevented those things rarely does. A government that pauses to name them and to compensate them is doing something that matters beyond the transaction.
Punjab’s Eid campaign will not be remembered as a miracle. It was the product of planning, coordination and technology brought to bear on a predictable annual challenge. But in a south asian region where such challenges routinely go unmet, competent execution is its own form of achievement and the people working in the heat deserve to be the headline.
The writer is a Lahore-based public policy analyst and can be reached at [email protected]