
Thar has made more news headlines in the last 10 years than any other district in Pakistan with a similar social and economic profile has. Its chronic poverty, its endemic lack of modern amenities and its high infant mortality rates have been reported about so many times that, to millions of Pakistanis, it has been caricatured into a basket case – a place where nothing works.
All this reporting was taking place in the context of some extraordinary developments in Thar – the start of coal mining and coal-based power generation. The proponents of these developments latched on to the narrative of Thar’s persistent backwardness in order to highlight the development and prosperity that could accompany its coal’s extraction and exploitation. New, sparkling, roads were promised and delivered; big and small water filtration plants were pledged and built; some new healthcare facilities were constructed while some older ones were upgraded. Thar, indeed, was touted as the poster child of a new paradigm for economic growth for the whole country – one that was premised on indigenous natural resources and an inclusive development.
In reality, however, neither the narrative of Thar being a basket case nor the slogan of Thar leading social-economic changes in the whole of Pakistan was accurate.
Our inaugural issue covers various aspects of Thar’s water woes and by doing so it not just aims at chronicling the desert’s past but also record its present and presage its future.
The Thar of popular imagination is a stricken place where nothing exists but sand dunes, where it rains only occasionally and where people are forced to migrate in large numbers to places with more water after a harsh sun beats down on dry dunes from a rainless sky. The images of Tharis moving with their cattle out of the desert get repeated during every drought that hits Thar every few years.
A Thar thus imagined leaves little space, if any, for the fact that it is one of the greenest deserts in the world. And, if and when it receives sufficient rains, it grows sizable quantities of many crops. That Thar perhaps has the highest human-to-cattle ratio in entire Pakistan also does not sit well within that imagination. That it has always had limestone mines, salt lakes and granite deposits is not something that can fit into the popular images emanating from it.
These material resources, though, do not fully explain why Thar is so loved by its residents. Its weather is harsh, its terrain is tough and water here is often salty and scarce. Yet, as its folk heroine, Marui, is reported by Sindh’s supreme sage, Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, to have told her captor: Loathe your drinks, oh Soomra! Better thirsty at home.
It is this love of the land that Tharis are generally known to migrate only temporarily. As soon as they hear about rain having returned to their homeland, they start moving back from canal-irrigated areas to their own villages along with their cattle.
Most of these people also dread coal-driven development. They complain of losing their ancestral lands to coal mines, power plants and other related infrastructure. They also grumble about getting only menial jobs in coal-related projects and their access to water, healthcare and education remains as precarious as ever – if it has not become worse.
In some places, the ravages of the coal industry have become too apparent to be ignored and yet the government, the parliament, the judiciary and even the civil society choose to look the other way. Gorano, a village of several thousand people, for instance, has lost its water, land and air all to a pond where wastewater taken out of coal mines is being dumped. Its residents protested for over two years, they moved courts, they met their political representatives and they invited members of civil society and news media to their village – all to no avail. These interlocutors always failed to see past the narrative being propagated by the state and the corporate sector that the only way to guarantee economic growth in Pakistan is to use Thar’s indigenous coal reserves for generating various types of energy. The money, time and effort that the state and the coal companies spend on media management, propaganda and public relations are certainly not going to waste.
The residents of Thar, on the other hand, have the support of a small coterie of well-meaning local journalists, some rather inconsequential political parties and a few rag tag platforms of social activists. Their voices often get muffled and drowned by the din about growth development being made by the opposite camp.
This is the gap that Earthwise aims at plugging. Its inaugural issue covers various aspects of Thar’s water woes and by doing so it not just aims at chronicling the desert’s past but also record its present and presage its future. The resources we have are decidedly paltry and the splash we can make will be admittedly small but we are committed not to make any editorial compromises in the pursuit of advertising revenues and social media monetization.
Marui said something similar centuries ago when her abductor reprimanded her for not taking a bath and not making her hair:
My tribesmen will reproach me, if my face looks washed and fair So to their thatches I’ll repair To wash off mansion dirt!