Have you recently traveled from Lahore to Sahiwal or Multan by road? If you haven’t, you should in order to be updated on what’s happening to our land and people. The Multan Road is a two hundred miles stretch with Sahiwal city right in the middle. Apart from vehicular chaos caused by unruly light and heavy traffic, you can’t miss a couple of things that rattle you with their frightening visibility all along the way. First thing you notice is an unending dusty stream of kiosks, shops, carts, assorted factories and single or two-storey commercial buildings lining up both sides of the road. You want to get rid of claustrophobic atmosphere of overcrowded metropolis as soon as possible but that seems well-nigh impossible. It looks the metropolis has an untidy tail that is much longer than its main body that continues to block the open green vistas the plains of Punjab are known for. The spectacle simply shows the skewed development vision our ruling powers are inflicted with.

Highways cutting through the countryside and small towns offer the rural masses a window of opportunity in terms of jobs, business and social uplift. Multan Road is no exception. People throng it in search of livelihood. But the highway is no longer what it should be; a clean smooth pathway connecting cities. As you leave the metropolis’s architectural skyline, though modern but incompatible with our weather conditions, and get onto the highway it tapers into a passage where entropy rules. What is crudely built or implanted along the highway serves as it’s viscera that reflect chaotic ugliness of malfunctioning society divided between the primitive and the modern. You feel as if you travel in a moving tunnel that can collapse any time burying you under its hazardous debris. Occasional brief appearances of the green of the countryside and patches of natural colours are your only solace.

Such a vaudeville, though a phenomenon in itself, is a symptomatic of another malaise; the population explosion. The factor of increased and increasing population is crucial in the whole scenario. Our highway has turned into a sort of rabbit warren which shows we breed like rabbits. Reasons are easily discernable. The poor produce more babies with a view to have a safety net; more hands are likely to secure economic future. But what happens is quite the opposite. Increased workforce in our capitalist society results in dwindling jobs and lowering the wages. Thus increased population adds to the indigence of the indigent. In such conditions, our highway has a magnetic pull where one may find chances of doing odd jobs. Reduced sizes of land holdings and mechanised farming have adversely affected the job market in the agrarian sector. Induction of machine has eliminated a large number of manual jobs traditionally associated with farming. The people rendered jobless in the process have no choice but to migrate to cities or move close to a highway to eke out their livelihood. A highway is the first preference as this odd arrangement may provide them with some income which is usually a pittance but the upside is that it doesn’t force them to abandon their traditional community life which somehow keeps them unhinged emotionally in their survival struggle.

Our highway is not just the story of the poor. Sharks have also surfaced recently out of blue. These predators are none other than the real estate developers. One is surprised to notice along the Multan Road from Lahore to Multan the ubiquitous presence of gaudy signboards and shoddy arched gates that announce the upcoming residential colonies with funny sounding names. These housing schemes aren’t anywhere near the bush. They are in fact so close to the road, it seems, they would eat away at it in the near future. Large chunks of the most fertile land continue to go under forever in the name of development. Constructed barrenness is what awaits us in the days to come.

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The people at the helm who sit pretty for now will face a social crisis and political agitation when compelled to widen the road, which is not wide enough, in order to manage the fast growing volume of traffic. They will have to demolish the front part of all such settlements. Will the panjandrums of the Punjab government explain why permanent construction has been allowed so close to the highway against all the rules in the first place?

If you take holistic view, the congestion along the highway, population pressure and emergence of housing colonies on the fertile land are interconnected. But the issue of fundamental importance is the high population growth. Rapid increase in population increases the chances of congestion and destruction of fertile land for shelter. What frightens us is how to make the idle hands busy again and feed the hungry bellies with our shrinking agricultural output? If we want to be indifferent, let’s be prepared what German poet Brecht said: ‘…But in the evening I looked up and saw them sitting on the wall eating/ and what they were eating was stones…’.