Sad news coming out of Karachi states that up to 20 people, mostly women and children died in a stampede in narrow lanes of Khori Garden area. A local businessman was distributing free wheat flour among the poor and needy of the society.
Due to overcrowding of narrow lanes, a stampede occured and the result was up to 20 deaths of women and children that were all preventable. I also want to add a line that I saw from author MB at Karachi Metroblogs: “This is humiliation to Humanity coming at its best” (read as “worst”). Very sad. Since Pakistan’s independence I’ve not heard of so many people losing their lives while trying to get food.
The dawn News update right now gives details as follows:
‘We have so far received 20 bodies of women and girls while the injured are more than 30,’ Amin Khan, an official at Civil Hospital Karachi, told AFP.
City police chief Wasim Ahmed said at least 18 women and children died in the stampede with dozens of others injured.
‘The deaths were caused by suffocation and the stampede in one of the most congested localities of Khori Garden, where a charity was distributing free flour among hundreds of women and children during Ramadan,’ he added.
Women clad in black burkas sobbed and wailed as ambulances screeched through the streets, ferrying the bodies and injured to hospital, where panicked relatives searched for their loved ones and dead bodies lay covered in sheets.
‘I have lost my little daughter,’ cried Karima in hospital. ‘I wanted a bag of flour for my family and my greed punished me so gravely,’ she sobbed.
A private security guard responsible for making sure the women formed an orderly queue baton charged the women when they became impatient with the long wait, said police and witnesses.
‘The women got scared and tried to save themselves… which caused the stampede,’ said local police official Hashmat Ali.
Injured Salma Qadir said the women wanted to get their rations quickly but were beaten by a guard.
‘The women scared and tried to turn back, which scared others and resulted in a stampede,’ she told AFP.
Several dozen women’s shoes, sandals and slippers were left lying on the road outside the distribution place in Khori Garden, a warren of narrow lanes and side streets ill equipped for large crowds, an AFP reporter said.
‘Fortunately, my mother and sister have survived and I am searching for their shoes and scarves here,’ said teenager Mohammad Kashif.
Shops in the area closed as a sign of mourning after the tragedy as women and children wailed outside the crowded emergency ward of the Civil Hospital Karachi where bodies and the injured were transported.
Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani ordered an immediate investigation into the incident and medical treatment for the injured in Karachi, a teeming city that is home to an estimated 14 million people.
Reference: Eyewitness Recounts at Dawn.com
Title Photo of this post is from Dawn.com
About two weeks after the widely reported wheat deaths in Karachi, there is a new damning British report about the serious malnutrition affecting Indian children.
A new British government report on child hunger and malnutrition in India says the nation is an “economic powerhouse” but a “nutritional weakling”. Here is an excerpt from Times online story:
“India is condemning another generation to brain damage, poor education and early death by failing to meet its targets for tackling the malnutrition that affects almost half of its children, a study backed by the British Government concluded yesterday.
The country is an “economic powerhouse but a nutritional weakling”, said the report by the British-based Institute of Development Studies (IDS), which incorporated papers by more than 20 India analysts. It said that despite India’s recent economic boom, at least 46 per cent of children up to the age of 3 still suffer from malnutrition, making the country home to a third of the world’s malnourished children. The UN defines malnutrition as a state in which an individual can no longer maintain natural bodily capacities such as growth, pregnancy, lactation, learning abilities, physical work and resisting and recovering from disease.
In 2001, India committed to the UN Millennium Development Goal of halving its number of hungry by 2015. China has already met its target. India, though, will not meet its goal until 2043, based on its current rate of progress, the IDS report concluded.
“It’s the contrast between India’s fantastic economic growth and its persistent malnutrition which is so shocking,” Lawrence Haddad, director of the IDS, told The Times. He said that an average of 6,000 children died every day in India; 2,000-3,000 of them from malnutrition.”
Read more at http://southasiainvestor.blogspot.com/2009/09/is-i ndia-condemning-its-children-to.html
Pakistan and its people have to decide: do they want to live in a country where women and children die in search of flour and everybody reacts as if nothing has happened, or they want to change the things for better? If we want to continue living like this, there is no future for Pakistan and there is no Pakistan in future.
Total failure of current government and the major role is played by PML-N which has it’s own agenda and distracting the government from core issues.
I am sure after no more then two iterations of democracy people will miss Musharaf’s era.
This is indeed a very tragic incident. It’s symptomatic of what has happened in Pakistan over the last year, as millions of jobs have disappeared, economic growth has evaporated, inflation has hit new highs, and poverty is on the rise again in 2008-09 after several years of decline from 2000-2008.
This is what happened in the lost decade of the 1990s under so-called “democracy” led by the PPP and PML.
IT IS SAD TO SEE WE ARE RETURNING TO THE BAD OLD DAYS! ALL IN THE NAME OF DEMOCRACY!!
Please read more at http://www.riazhaq.com/2009/09/undp-reports-pakist an-poverty-declined.html
Sad and unfortunate. Poverty is a disease.