KARACHI: Various civil society organisations on Wednesday demanded that those who failed to discharge their responsibility to protect human life in Thar are tried in a court of law and their names are place d in the exit control list (ECL) until legal action is finally taken against them.

`After an independent inquiry, responsibility should be fixed as to who are responsible for such a huge loss of human lives. But until then the honourable courts should order the authorities to ban certain individuals from leaving the country who were in-charge of the departments and responsible for looking after people`s wellbeing,` said Karamat Ali, executive director of the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (Piler).

He was addressing a joint press conference at the Karachi Press Club with Dr Sono Khangharani of Hisar Foundation; Saeed Baloch of Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum (PFF) and Taj Marri of Hari Sangat.

While asking the government to take measures for provision of social protection to all citizens of Pakistan, they proposed that a public distribution system (PDS) through the ration card was reinitiated to ensure food security to the vulnerable populations of the society, especially those living in remote areas like Thar and arid zones. In the present system the poor andvulnerable did not have access to food, they added.

They asked the government to distribute all government land among landless peasants through land reforms, saying that they believed that concentration of wealth, land and natural resources had created famines.

They said that relief measures in Thar supervised by an `overactive` state and non-governmental machinery might not serve any purpose beyond a point as the alarming situation in the region demanded a complete overhaul of the system.

They said that Thar presented the worst human development indicators inthe province as well as in the country with the state denying the local population every single social service that was the right of the people while it continued to refrain from making any special provisions for people living in the difficult desert regions where living and livelihood conditions were naturally hostile.

A fact sheet distributed among the journalists states that Thar located in what is known as `tail-end areas` where access to water is largely compromised.

Some 45 per cent of its population comprises of the Hindu community, 90pc of which bracketed in the scheduled castes.

Agriculture and livestockare the main livelihood sources in the area, with a majority of farmers being small farmers owning an average of 2.5 acres of cultivable land. Sindh`s larger cities, including Karachi and Hyderabad, get their meat and milk supplies from Thar that alone houses 65pc of the 6.925 million head of cattle in the province. The district`s over 1.3m population is heavily rural.

Thespeakersreferredtoa recent report describing 58pc of the country`s population as poor and marked Thar as the one with the highest incidence of poverty in Sindh (47pc households falling below the poverty line). Thar is followed by Mirpurkhas which is the sec-ond poorest district with 44pc poor households.

Badin, Tando Mohammad Khan and Thatta are other poor districts in the list.

All these districts have more than 40pc of households falling below the poverty line.

At the same time, the caloric poverty levels stand highest in the district. They referred to a World Food Programme report, saying that two-thirds of the population fell below the caloric poverty line, meaning they are unable to consume the required calories intake essential for human survival and healthy living.

`The district also crosses the Sindh`s overall average of 40pc of children being underweight as half the children below the age of five, in Thar are underweight! They said there was one hospital bed for 4,135 people in the entire region of Mirpurkhas, Umerkot and Thar. There were only 171 basic health centres, 11 rural health centres and seven hospitals for a population of over three million in the three districts, they added.

With one-third of Thari children out of school, the lucky few who go to school had to contend with a compromising student-teacher ratio as well as basic services such as drinking water and toilets in schools, they added.

They demanded that a permanent monitoring setup/unit was established in Thar to prevent future deaths due to starvation and severe malnutrition.