A pang of sensation arose in both my palms, like the stabbing of needles, right as I got done doing the dishes. Who knew the cost of cooking my friends prawn curry would be more than just time and money.
The skin burning due to spices was compounded by the soap I exposed my bare hands to. I then did some self remedy by applying some coconut oil and it was at this point that my mind harked back to a recent excursion to Machar Colony, (Fishermen Colony), a 4 sq kılometer stretch of land squashed between the coast, the industries and a dry port in Karachi.
Described by the local politician as an unmanageable Katchi Basti (large shanty community), Machar Colony is a scatter of open sewers, garbage heaps and dilapidated hall-like buildings.
Inside these halls, or ‘wara’ as they are locally known, dozens of women sit with slouched backs and lowered heads on tiny stools, their hands submerged in brine gutting shrimps, readying the fresh catch for packaging. The export markets want their shrimps meticulous and women in Karachi do the dirty work, commencing work day even before the break of dawn.
As early as 3 AM, as Karachi sleeps, hundreds of women, young and old, and including adolescents, gather around the various waras. Soon after the doors open and they file in, the grind begins, and for hours on end they just do one thing: peel and gut the freshly caught shrimps to make them fit for export. Each cleaned shrimp is tossed into a bucket, which when filled, is replaced with an empty one.
The race is to get as many buckets filled with the cleaned shrimps as possible; for each bucket of cleaned shrimps, they receive a humiliating sum of around Rs150 Pakistani rupees, or less than a US dollar (USD 0.60). The bucket in question roughly holds up to 10 kilograms of raw catch – or hundreds of crustaceans.
“I usually manage to clean enough shrimps to fill about 6 buckets a day, says Salima Bibi, one of the workers.
The average is about 5- to 6 buckets, says the woman supervisor.
Even if they work for 30 days a month, their earnings are usually less than 30 thousand Pakistani rupees a month, less than the minimum wage rate of the province for unskilled workers, which is currently Rs37,000 Pakistani rupees (Roughly USD $137)
Almost all the families in Machar Colony share the same ethnic background: Bengali. Each has a different story, but the experiences they share with this writer are dismally similar, reflecting the systematic and collective prejudice they face as a community.
Chronically Ghettoized
On Sep 4, the Sindh Assembly, the provincial parliament, resounded with what civil society people immediately termed hate speech and racial profiling of all Bengalis, tacitly suggesting all of them have come illegally from Bangladesh, which isn’t true.
One provincial lawmaker in the treasury, Heer Soho, called them all out for being a “burden” on resources of the whole province, which “only belong to Sindhis”, and that the ‘illegal migrants’ were the “root cause of terrorism and street crimes”. In making these sweeping remarks reeking of ethnic hate, she failed to furnish any event or statistics based on which she may have reached such a conclusion.
Nevertheless a resolution was passed in the assembly calling for the en masse expulsion of all “Aghwanis [a derogatory mispronunciation of Afghans], Bengalis and Biharis” because they are “all illegally staying in Pakistan”.
But despite this perennial discrimination, what keeps these teflon women running is their myriad troubles, ranging from eking out their subsistence to family exploitation in an ultra patriarchal society, where the further you go down the economic ladder, the more you’re likely to accept gender exploitation as a norm that nobody so much as raises a brow at.
These women do the labour to meet the various household expenses, but that doesn’t spare them from the burden of running the house affairs and errands. The fathers, or men in general, in this equation are often just symbolic figures, present but barely involved.
Most of the men can’t find any employment anywhere other than in precarious professions such as fishing in the deep seas or toiling in the unorganized sector, where employers hire them without having to record their existence. Overworked and grossly underpaid for backbreaking hours of labor, the men remain vulnerable to exploitation at all levels.
The community members are yet to gain acknowledgement of their existence in the eyes of the authorities, and have neither identification papers nor national ID cards despite living in the ‘land of the pure’ their whole lives and with parents who lived their whole lives here as well.
“I stepped out of my house to earn money for the first time two years ago after my husband was caught by the Indian Navy,” said Salima bibi, a 28-year-old mother of four, veiled and clad in a black abaya, said during her shift in the wara.
“We are poor but I never had to worry about making a living until my husband’s arrest across the country, but now I have to get any job I can get my hands on to keep the house affairs running.”
After the Indian Navy arrested her husband, because he allegedly trespassed the marine border, Salima realized that the burden of keeping her household afloat and feeding her children had fallen entirely on her shoulders. Her husband remained under custody despite the UN’s Convention of the Law of the Sea whose article 73 binds neighboring countries to release the fishermen from each other’s countries after due protocols are followed.
Salima Bibi was forced to take her eldest daughter out of school to take care of the household and her younger siblings while she toils away in a wara.
Feel Good Conventions
On both sides of the border, the fishermen are caught and then languish in jails for years while their respective families in the home countries also suffer just as much in waiting as they shoulder financial crises brought on by the absence of the earning member of the household.
“If not for our desperate financial circumstances, most of us women would not take on such a dehumanizing role in the local fishery,” says Kulsoom bibi, the wara labour incharge.
While the complexities of implementing a UN convention that involves two rival countries are significant, the international laws that Pakistan is a signatory of and the state alone is responsible for seem equally unable to come to the rescue of this community.
One such UN convention is the global biodiversity framework whose short term targets 9 and 10 bind Pakistan to take due steps for rehabilitation and sustainable management of providing social, economic and environmental benefits for people, especially those in vulnerable situations and those most dependent on biodiversity, especially the local communities, which qualifies local machera community of Machar colony, yet they’re at the worst receiving end.
It’s safety or subsistence
Shrimp peeling is a hazardous occupation and is usually the last resort for these women to survive. Hours of immersion in salt water renders the skin of the hands vulnerable to blistering, cuts, wounds and sores. The women are given neither gloves to protect their hands or medication.
“If we wear proper gloves, we will miss the details of shells and guts on the tiny, delicate arthropods,” says Kulsoom bibi.
Since they cannot get them treated, these cuts lead to further infections of the skin. These infected and aching hands then cook food at home, cater to babies, and also expose babies’ skin to them.
Muhammad Ilyas Kiddiwala, a 39-year-old who also identifies himself as a social worker, runs a shrimp peeling enterprise in Machar Colony and talks in detail about the downside of his business. “Pakistani shrimps don’t make it to the European or American markets, the largest recipient of them globally, pushing the shrimp catch in the overall fishery on the fringes,” he said.
It’s been the case for a decade and a half, and the reason?
You guessed it right: it’s “too unhygienic”, he says, for their standards. Kiddiwala regrets the situation for his community here and says despite the challenges and ever shrinking markets, he continues to run the wara so women here can make a living.
Forlorn figures
Until recently the only remaining large export market for Pakistani shrimp was China. “Chinese companies would buy from us and repackage them as their own product to sell it to the US,” he said, adding that even that market is out of reach now as the US has imposed more taxes on China, so to make it still profitable the Chinese companies slashed the rate from $4.85 a kilogram to $3.2. Now even the fishing boats don’t catch them because the bare expenses of the boat, its staff and fuel aren’t covered.
The dire economic situation, the ethnic marginalization and the dangling sword of statelessness together push them in the darkest corners of the urban underbelly. Getting to the end of the day, then, feels like an achievement so even the personal health and hygiene don’t stand a chance in the list of priorities, let alone ecological health and area neighborhood cleanliness.
In the past there has been an unbridled and underchecked spread of Hepatitis C in Machar Colony. Until Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) took it upon itself to vaccinate people starting 2015, nobody had spared it much thought.
MSF said that just in the past year it initiated lifesaving antiviral treatment for 1,942 patients, and ultimately cured 981 people of hepatitis C.
The presence of a wide range of bacteria in this area, for its peculiarities, comes as no surprise to anyone with a profile in medicine and biology.
“Some of the most common bacteria that easily spread among humans and animals in such settlements as Machar Colony, are mycobacteria, erysipelothrix, vibrio and aermonans,” said infectious disease specialist Dr Faisal Mehmood.
He added that in order to diagnose them you need specialists and to treat them, some basic health facility at least. That isn’t the case in the area, and barring a couple NGOs like MSF no one’s extending this unjustifiably condemned community any healthcare.
“These bacteria, easily transmittable to humans, are very peculiar to fishes and shellfish, and are not easy to diagnose and hard to treat…”
Dr Mehmood, who is the head of Infectious Diseases Section at Aga Khan University Hospital, confirms that the skin infections due to such interaction of these working women with shrimps, are likely to get worse and spread, and at a much higher rate if developed in an ever degrading ecology like that of Machar Colony. He says that fears of zoonoses emerging from such areas are also alarmingly relevant.
“Around about 50 per cent of the burden of diseases in Pakistan are due to communicable diseases,” said Dr Zafar Mirza, ex Special Assistant to Prime Minister on Health, during the times of Covid.
After airborne viruses and bacteria, whose prime example was Covid, many viruses spread through intermediate agencies that are called vectors, and most common agencies are mosquitos, mice, bats.
Talking specifically about Machar Colony makeup, the former top health aide said this area is an easy and most susceptible target to a host of viruses and bacteria-infections, thanks to the ready agencies galore.
Dr Mirza says these vectors can transmit diseases both to humans and other animals. “But in an area such a Machar colony with congested settlements and so much moisture, the likelihood of waterborne diseases, such as typhoid, cholera and amoebiasis is the highest there.”
However, Dr Mirza adds that fishery is not the only particular of that area since it’s at the junction of sewers, garbage heaps and all kinds of bacteria and viruses, ranging from air-, blood-, vector- and water-borne are likely to be found there without coming as a surprise.
Women there get stabbed and wounded by shellfish; it’s congested and overcrowded without right facilities, it’s a crucible for diseases and in fact outbreaks, he confirmed.
Just early this year in May, from its environmental sample collection the presence of poliovirus was yet another alarming development but barely made it beyond a few regular news articles.
Of course, some romance!
When this question was posed to Qadir Patel, member national assembly from the constituency (NA243) within which lies Machar Colony, he said it is very unlikely for the people in such an area to develop infections, both viral or bacterial, since their immunity is very strong when compared with areas like Defence (a high-end neighborhood in Karachi).
“You have very little knowledge if you think these people are susceptible to infections, because if you did your research well, you’d know that people in Machar Colony have very strong resistance to viruses.”
When countered with questions about recent outbreaks such as Covid-19, which may have spread across communities from an animal source at wet markets and cholera, which spreads rapidly across relatively less developed neighborhoods, he said, “Go and ask the health ministers of the relevant countries where they broke out.”
Qadir has been elected from this constituency repeatedly in the last many terms and has served as a federal health minister in the preceding government as well. As we speak, his party, Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), is part of the federal government alliance; has absolute control over provincial setup; and in the last local government election they also swept Karachi districts, thereby being part of all three tiers of the government. There’s practically nothing Patel couldn’t have done for the constituency.
He has served as a Member of Provincial Assembly, but a great chunk of the population there, in his constituency, now called NA 243 after the fresh delimitations, cannot vote. Electorally disenfranchised, the Bengali community remains neglected and the denial of their basic rights is even leveraged to curry favour with other communities that compete for scarce education and livelihood opportunities.
Qadir shrugged off questions about community vulnerability to infections and possible epidemics, to instead volunteering explanations about other complications that prevailed in Machar Colony, namely, that different land owning agencies were laying claims to the area – a challenge which was out of his hands, being a federal matter.
He then spoke about how solid waste management and cleaning of nullah and the whole neighborhood was a local government matter, which is administered by his party, and how health was a provincial affair after the 18th Constitutional amendment.
Personae non gratae
Residents there say it’s just bias against them, since they cannot vote, having been rendered stateless by the state, jobless by the economy and on survival mode by an entire system.
Dr Mehmood said that though it can be argued that people living in such dehumanizing settlements “can have better, stronger immunity, but the viruses have a way to navigate the fortifications and their different variants can be stronger than people can adapt to”.
Dr Mehmood also said the women when they go home and cater to their house chores and children, are likely to transfer the viruses, bacteria to them in the absence of health facilities at their disposal.
Dr Sadia Khalil is a microbiologist and an assistant professor at FUSAAT microbiology department who vehemently disputes Patel’s remarks and understanding of infections.
“He has a superficial understanding and that too despite having held a top health portfolio.”
If the women there concede wounds without ready access to medicine and are deprived of rest due to their back breaking work, their first lines of defense are already compromised, making them more prone to viruses than any other, she stressed as if it was so necessary and common information.
This was confirmed by MSF, which said some Hepatitis C patients were infected with a resistant virus or developed resistance to direct acting antiviral drugs and cannot be cured, even with second-line medication.
One Health
The three experts also stressed on One Health: The connection between human, animal, and environmental health.
While this is still an underreported matter and therefore technical to understand, a humanized definition of it is that the well-being of each is deeply intertwined—human health is impacted by the health of animals and the environment we share.
For context, even a quick Google search would take you to the World Health Organization definition: “One Health is a collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary approach — working at the local, regional, national, and global levels — with the goal of achieving optimal health outcomes recognizing the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment.”
Dr Khalil points out that even people at the helm, like our federal health minister, don’t understand these basic concepts, what do you expect from the the masses.
“Humans, animals and ecology must all sustain for a better society and the damage to any one of them is a damage, long- and/or short-term, to everything. That’s One Health for you and in wake of Covid and amid MPox, we need to now more than ever not only understand it but devise policies with One Health at heart.”
Superficial sensationalism
But till any policymaking or even bare minimum understanding of these concepts commences, people in this area, Machar Colony will continue to incrementally suffer.
“We don’t talk to the media because that only makes things further worse for us,” says Kiddiwala.
He said that reports have been published on them and Machar Colony before, and “each time their superficial coverage resulted in more stringent laws against us, more bans on our enterprises and more exclusion of our people”.
The singularity of this area isn’t just limited to its uncommon enterprises; fishery but also its ethnic diversity.
Among the many aspirations that the people here harbor, one is to someday be included in the NADRA’s official list as citizens, from their current general status as stateless.
But all that is secondary to literally their life, and their livelihood, which remain forever at stake.
This story was part of Earth Journalism Network fellowship on One Health. I am indebted, greatly, to Jayalakshmi Shreedhar and Ramesh Bhushal for guiding with its editing and designing every step of the way. I owe it to Nawabzada Danyal ur Rehman for assisting me in this story and its publication.
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