Chaiyyaan, chaiyyan?

Traveling by road from Khanewal to Lahore, I could not hold back my tears seeing the infrastructure for electrification in ruin that had been laid out with the expense of billions by Ayub Khan. The electric trains plied for some time on this track, long enough to show that Pakistan was on the track of progress back then. But then as one incompetent ruler after the other took over, wires overhead were deprived of the of electricity. With no electricity in the country, it was not possible to run electric trains. So the poles, wires and other adjuncts, shorn of electricity and in disrepair, kept falling apart and the vandals did the rest pulling out implements of the electric train system and plundering even power transmission lines. It is such a depressing sight today that one feels like hanging all our rulers, past and present, with the poles along the railway line. -S. MEHMOOD, Lahore, April 29.

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