Faizaan Qayyum

LET us commit to Act for Nutrition. After all, Pakistan’s nutrition emergency is most visible in its children — around four in 10 children under five are stunted — due to poverty, poor maternal nutrition, recurrent illness, unsafe water, and inadequate feeding habits. However, a conversation conducted entirely in the language of scarcity will miss the other end — the fact that well-fed affluent households are not well nourished. Money can buy good food. It cannot make you choose it.

IT is the stuff of horror movies: our roads are killers. They kill children and men and women, old and young. They kill animals. Occasionally, they spare a life but maim and disable instead. Alongside runs our circus of the blind. Almost half of all road fatalities in Pakistan are pedestrians. Of course, they’re at fault. At other times, we blame driving habits. People drive too fast. Nobody obeys traffic laws. In brief, epiphanic moments, we blame the cops. Enforcement of traffic laws is poor.

It seems to be working. The unprecedented increase in fuel prices has forced some people to move away from private vehicles and switch to public transport, especially in cities like Lahore and Islamabad where multiple transit lines are currently operational. Karachi is scrambling to fully operationalise the People’s Bus Service. By all means, this is a good thing. Our energy crisis is a crisis of built form. We have to re-build out of it – only this time, do it differently, and do it better.