Of university exams and global warming

By Afzal Hussain Bokhari

Being the oldest and the biggest seat of higher learning in the province, Peshawar University is generally held in high esteem by all and sundry. People expect of the university to be more professional and organised than those working in the private sector. However, the ongoing annual BA/BSc examinations 2010 indicate that the level of professionalism and the standard of being well-organised leave much to be desired.

BA/BSc examinations started on May 20 but students who appeared as private candidates complained that many of them did not receive their roll number slips on time. On Friday, several of the affected students futilely queued up outside the examination branch under a burning end-of-May sun. At some examination centres in Nowshera, a few of the candidates tried to get into the halls on humanitarian grounds but the superintendents pretended to be disciplinarian although the university’s secrecy branch and the examination wing had provided to every centre full details of the candidates appearing in their respective halls and the supervisory staff had the authority to temporarily allow in any candidate who failed to get the roll number slip on time.

When contacted, controller of examinations, Peshawar University, Iftikhar Hussain, said that his section dispatched the roll number slips to all the candidates well before the exams. He added that through newspapers the university made the announcement that candidates not getting the slips should promptly contact the controller’s office to get the duplicate slip. Still if some private candidates failed to receive the slips, the fault might lie with them.

By temperament or due to the rural background, private candidates do not happen to be as smart and clever as the regular students of, say, the Edwardes College can possibly be. Although they are supposed to pay slightly higher admission fee than the regular students but due to being shy, reticent and withdrawn, they do not assert themselves with sharp reflexes in case of injustice or highhandedness. If the victims had been the students of Edwardes College or the Science Superior College, they would very likely have ransacked the examination branch in the wildest possible manner and the controller would personally have rushed to their centre with the slips and apologies.

One may be excused for drawing the parallels but the IDPs in Hunza are trying to raise their voice like the college students. Reports on Sunday afternoon said that there were genuine fears that water in the 30-km-long artificial Hunza lake could flow downhill in the form of flash floods thus endangering some power houses and inundating lands in Shangla, Mansehra, Kohistan and Batgram districts of the Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa province.

Being the last village of Hunza tehsil, the affected Attaabad is divided into upper and lower portions. In 2002, a powerful earthquake in Istor caused cracks in the nearby mountains. On January 4, 2010, landslides brought huge rocks tumbling down into the Hunza River passing by Attaabad village. The result was that rocks blocked the flow of the river water.

Meanwhile, the residents of Upper Attaabad back in the middle of 2009 brought the fact once more to the notice of the government as well as an NGO named Focus Pakistan International that the nearby mountain was slipping and cracks in it widening. With mixed feelings of fear and concern, one of the residents said that widening cracks had rendered his farm into an uneven stretch of land that looked at places like a staircase. “If I water the farm, it instantly gets sucked in somewhere”, he said.

Early in December 2009, when the cracks widened in a threatening manner, the government declared Upper Attaabad as unsafe and advised the residents to move down to Lower Attaabad which until then was considered safe.

What happened on January 4 was that instead of slipping gradually, the mountain to the right of Upper Attaabad fell straight into the Hunza River. Instead of sinking quietly to the river-bed, the debris of the mountain rebounded like a bouncing ball and fell on to the ‘officially safe’ Lower Attaabad. The process of the mountain breaking off into the river and then playfully rebounding on to the lower part of the village is described by residents as ‘splash’.

Reports on Sunday indicated that more houses had been submerged by the lake water in villages of Ayeenabad, Shishkat, Gulmit (tehsil Gojal), Ghulkin and Husaini. Water was said to be just five feet below the spillway built on the lake. Frontier Works Organisation (FWO) made the spillway at a place where village Attaabad once stood.

Authorities told BBC that water level had risen so sharply that it was no longer possible to attempt any measurement. Three of the suspended bridges, which fascinated the tourists, have been submerged in water. As far as situation in the upper area was concerned, in Shishkat and Gulmit alone, the number of houses submerged in water reached 146. The lake water posed a direct threat to village Gulmit, the headquarters of tehsil Gojal.

Some of the residents told media persons that government had not asked them to vacate or abandon their houses but they felt awfully unnerved when land-sliding occurred at night and huge rocks fell into water. Angry IDPs complained that dignitaries visiting the area were treating the place like a picnic spot while the relief goods were being distributed by a few NGOs.

It is not just the poor and the less privileged that have been affected. The high and mighty have equally hit by the calamity. Member of legislative assembly (MLA) of Gilgit-Baltistan, Mutabiat Shah, said that he heard from his forefathers that a similar lake was formed in December 1858. He said: “When the embankment gave way in July 1859, so powerful was the force of water that it pushed the Indus water back up to five kilometres.

An in-service Colonel belonging to village Shishkat said that he was reminded of a documentary film aired by the National Geographic television channel in which a dam was being constantly monitored but when it gave way, there was no clue left of the monitoring devices. So with Hunza happenings, we have probably entered the age of global warming. Iftikhar Arif was right when he said: “Jahan bhonchal buniyad-i-faseel-o-dar main rehtay hain; hamara hausla dekho hum aisay ghar main rehtay hain”.