Pakistan Cabinet approves Hajj policy 2012

ISLAMABAD, Apr 25 2012: The Federal Cabinet gave its unanimous approval for Pakistan‘s Hajj Policy and Plan for the year 2012. The monister for information Mr. Qamar Zaman Kaira old the newsmen in a press conference today that “After the signing of bilateral annual agreement between the Government of Pakistan and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on February 22, Hajj Policy 2011 has been reviewed and modified on the basis of an in-depth analysis and consultation with all stakeholders through Hajj workshops at Islamabad, Lahore, Karachi and Quetta”.

While giving details of the Hajj policy the religious affairs minister said the Hajj quota for 2012 will remain 179,210 and Hajj scheme-2012 shall be implemented through Government Scheme and Private Hajj Group Organizer (HGOs) in the ration of 50:50.

He said that applications for Hajj-2012 under Government Hajj Scheme shall be received on the principle of “First come, First serve”.

Kaira said that the applications under Government scheme will be invited through designated banks and the intending pilgrims may apply in the group of 10-25 through a group leader.

Any person who has performed Hajj during the last five years will not be eligible to perform Hajj in 2012 except Mehram, Group Leader or the one undertaking Hajj-e-Badal.

He said that under the Government Hajj Scheme, three categories of accommodation i.e. Blue Category within 900 meters without transport with a rental ceiling of Saudi Riyals (SR) 7500 per pilgrim, Green Category within 2000 meters with transport with a rental ceiling of SR 5000 per pilgrim and White Category beyond 2000 meters with transport with a rental ceiling of SR 3600 per pilgrim will be arranged by Pakistan Hajj Mission, Jeddah.

The minister said that pilgrims under Government scheme will not be required to pay any amount on account of Personal Exchange Quota (PEQ) and same will be arranged by them from open market through banks or foreign exchange companies.

Pilgrims, he said, will be airlifted by four air carriers i.e. PIA, Shaheen Air International, Saudi Airline and NAS Air.

Airfare for Hajj-2012 as finalised with PIA will be Rs 73000 for south region and Rs 85000 for north region

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Book reading linked to moral, social, intellectual uplift of a nation – Gilani

ISLAMABAD, Apr 22 2012: Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani has emphasised the need of Book reading culture in Pakistan. The prime minister announced the celebration of April 22 each year as National Book Day. He said that that culture of book reading is closely linked to moral, social and intellectual uplift of a nation.

“The purpose of dedicating a day in this respect is aimed at highlighting the importance of book reading and encouraging the citizens of Pakistan to spare some time for turning to books,” Gilani said in his message on the occasion of National Book Day. He said, “books are not only repository of knowledge but also a gateway to the world of enlightenment.

They also document history, arts & culture, scientific and technological achievements and bequeath them to future generations. They also play critical role in intellectual, psychological and moral development of human beings.

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Katas Raj ponds drying up due to water supply

The scred ponds at Katas Raj temples are drying up due to the tubewells in the area by a cement factory nearbye.

On the other hand water from the pond is being supplied to Choa Syedan Shah and Waula village as the Punjab government could not provide any alternative facility to the residents of the area.

The water supply to Choa Syedan Shah was sanctioned before partition on the condition that the water in the pond would be maintained to a certain level. Till 2007, there was no
shortage of water in the pond. As Chakwal saw an industrial development recently, three cement factories were developed in tehsil Choa Syedan Shah.

The cement factory near Katas Temples Complex is posing a threat to the pond. Sources told Dawn that the administration of the factory had pledged that it would arrange water for the factory from the Jhelum River but later it installed many tubewells near the temples. The massive use of water in the factory has not only harmed the pond but also the nearby villages are also facing severe water shortage. The residents of Waula, a village situated at the back of the factory, were left with no other option but to get water from the pond. Currently, two water pumps are installed at both sides of the pond: one for Choa Syedan Shah and the other for Waula village.

“The water in our village has disappeared due to the cement factory,” says Fazal Elahi, an attendant of the water pumps and a resident of Waula village. He said a water supply scheme had been approved by the Punjab government for the village but work on it could not be started yet. The villagers had protested many times against the unwarranted water use by the factory but to no avail.

When contacted, the deputy administration officer of the cement factory said the tubewells had nothing to do with the shortage of water in the pond.

On the other hand, work on the water supply scheme approved for Choa Syedan Shah is still to be initiated as the departments concerned are doing nothing except blaming one another for the delay.

According to the Hindu mythology, the holy pond came into existence as Lord Shiva wept over the demise of his beloved wife Sati.

Archaeological department of Punjab has also closed its eyes to the pond while the district administration is of the view that it has nothing to do with the affairs of the temple as it is
the responsibility of the archaeology department and Evacuee Trust Property Board (ETPB). “We have nothing to do with the affairs of Katas Raj Temples and the pond,” said Assistant Commissioner of Choa Syedan Shah Abdul Majid. He said the district administration had provided utmost support to the Hindu Yatrees when they visited the temples.

When contacted, Director General Punjab Archaeology Department Haroon Ahmad Khan also came up with the same version. “Archaeology department has nothing to do with the pond,” he said. Tehsil Municipal Officer (TMO) Raja Ahmad Farooq said they did not have any alternative but to get water from the pond for Choa Syedan Shah and Waula village.

“The Public Health Department has got funds to provide water supply but it has done nothing,” he stated.

Subdivisional officer of the Public Health Department Ramzan Ahmad said efforts were underway to arrange water supply to Choa Syedan Shah. “Work on the water supply scheme is going on and it will be completed very soon,” he claimed.

Unfortunately, not only the sacred pond has become a victim of officials’ apathy but the ancient temples are also crumbling.

Talking to Dawn on phone from Karachi, President of Pakistan Hindu Council Dr Ramesh Kumar expressed concern over the plight of Katas Temples Complex. “The Punjab government should take immediate steps to preserve Katas Temples and the pond,” he added. He said the chairman of ETPB and attendants of all the temples should be from the Hindu community, as they could properly protect their religious sites.

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Bhoja Air plane crashed near Islamabad airport

A private airling boarding 127 people from Karachi destined to Islamabad has crashed near Islamabad’s Banazir International Airport. According to initial information plane has crashed due to bad weather in the city. The crash happened at an area called Lui Bhair of Rawalpindi.

Bhoja Air is a private airline from Pakistan, who just started its operation recently after having been suspended for several years.

People residing close to the Bahria Town residential complex located near the Islamabad airport say emergency vehicles can be seen in the area.

A violent rain and wind storm was lashing parts of the capital around the same time as the crash, said an aviation official, adding lightening might have caused the plane to catch fire.

According to AFP  Saifur Rehman, an official from the police rescue team said the plane came down in Hussain Abad village, about three kilometres (two miles) from the main Islamabad highway.

“Fire erupted after the crash. The wreckage is on fire, the plane is completely destroyed. We have come with teams of firefighters and searchlights and more rescuers are coming,” Rehman told a private television channel.

An airport source said that flight number BHO-213 of Bhoja Airline was due to land at Islamabad airport at 6:50 pm (1350 GMT) but lost contact with the control tower at 6:40 pm and crashed shortly afterwards before reaching the runway.

Plane crashes are relatively rare in Pakistan, where inter-city travel is most efficient by air.

History of Plane Crashes in Pakistan | Airblue Plane crash

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Gaciers in the Karakorums and Himalays growing

With the wows of global warming and concerns of world for glaciers and sea ice around the world are melting at unprecedented rates, The mountains and glaciers in the Karakorum and Himalaya region have not quite followed the rest of the world.

New data collected by researchers, in a new study,  indicates that that the Karakoram mountain range is not melting like the polar region and other regions of the world. They are holding steady, and may even be growing in size, the study, published in the April 2012 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, suggests.

“The rest of the glaciers in the Himalayas are mostly melting, in that they have negative mass balance, here we found that glaciers aren’t,” study researcher Julie Gardelle, of CNRS-Université Grenoble, France, told LiveScience. “This is an anomalous behavior.”

Karakoram mountains

The Karakoram mountain range spans the India-China-Pakistan border. It is home to the world’s second highest peak, K2, and has the highest concentration of peaks over 5 miles (8 kilometers) high in the world. It is home to about half of the volume of the Himalayan glaciers.

The researchers used satellite photos to analyze the extent of the ice in about a quarter of the total range — about 2,167 square miles (5,615 square kilometers). The photos were taken in 1999 and 2008. The researchers used two computer models to translate the images, revealing the elevation of the glaciers and estimating the extent of the ice.

They found that the glaciers are holding steady and based on the numbers might actually be gaining mass. But Gardelle warns this doesn’t mean global warming and glacier melt isn’t happening elsewhere.

“We don’t want this study to be seen as questioning the planet’s global warming,” she told LiveScience. “With global warming we can get higher precipitation at high altitudes and latitudes, so thickening isn’t out of the question.” [10 Global Warming Myths Busted]

Glacier growth
Glaciers grow and shrink based on how much snow falls and the temperatures in the area. Why this area isn’t showing the melt seen in other areas is still a mystery. “For now we don’t have any explanation,” Gardelle said. “There’s been a study reporting an increase in winter precipitation, this could maybe be a reason for the equilibrium, but that’s just a guess.”

Because of its location and physical characteristics of the glaciers themselves, it was been exceptionally difficult to study the glaciers in this region. Usually satellite photos are combined with physical readings of the ice extent, and Gardelle says they’d like to get the physical data in the future to validate their findings.

Previous estimates had suggested the Himalayan mountain range as a whole was contributing about 0.04 millimeters per year to sea-level rise. These numbers now need to be adjusted to account for the anomaly of the Karakoram region, and are probably more like negative 0.006 millimeters per year, the researchers say.

“Evidently, extrapolation and analogy have failed in this significant region,” Graham Cogley, a researcher from Trent University, in Canada, who wasn’t involved in the study wrote in an accompanying essay in the same issue of Nature Geoscience.

“It seems that, by a quirk of the atmospheric general circulation that is not understood, more snow is being delivered to the mountain range at present and less heat,” Cogley wrote. “Gardelle and colleagues have demonstrated that the mass balance of Karakoram glaciers is indeed anomalous compared with the global average.”

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From Lyari with love – The Stone age by Dawn

This is Lyari — a neighbourhood that everyone in Karachi talks and knows about. A pertinent question: how many Karachiites, other than those who live here, have ever set foot in the area? Answer: a handful.

Lyari is like an award-winning, controversial, well-publicised book that only voracious readers have gone through but everyone has an opinion about. The perception is: it is dangerous territory. If you are not familiar with its dark alleys, if you do not have friends in Lyari, you can fall prey to the sporadic violence which has become all but synonymous with it. This is not true, because, another question: cannot this be said about the whole of Pakistan? In fact, Lyari has a clear distinction. It is a neighbourhood with soul. And that’s rare.Some historians believe Lyari predates British rule in the region. Architect and conservationist Yasmeen Lari in her book Karachi during the Raj writes: “By 1890 the population of Lyari had already reached 24,600.” The people who inhabit this zone are an honest-to-the-core lot. Yes, they have their share of miscreants like any other community. Yes, development is something that has not reached them the way they deserve it. Yes, they scream when someone steps on their foot. Who wouldn’t? They love their football and boxing, and like to engage in a hearty social chitchat after dusk. Rest assured: they do not beat about the bush, which makes them all the more endearing.

Visiting Lyari can be an utterly rewarding experience for a number of reasons; one of them is that the colonial buildings that remain amidst a slapdash growth of concrete flats and houses are no less significant. (They do not outnumber modern constructions.) A smattering of such structures amidst the markedly contemporary residential and commercial facilities, to date, embodies the quality of making their viewer appreciate architecture and history in equal measure. Let’s take a look at that part of Lyari where the famous Kakri Ground is located. Simply put: a small stretch of Nawab Mahabat Khanji Road. If you have entered the area taking a detour from Merewether Tower, as soon as you hit this road and cross the big entrance on which ‘Welcome to Lyari’ is written in large fonts, there is no chance in the world you will not see a beautiful stone-made building with a boundary wall. The boundary wall blocks the view of the structure’s ground floor, so the urge to peruse the building up-close is natural. If you belong to the male species, you cannot easily step into it. Why? It’s the Ronaq-i-Islam Degree Girls College.

Even a cursory look at the institution reveals what a delightful work of architecture it is, despite the fact that its arched openings have been stuffed up with jalis perhaps made of cement. The ground storey too has been painted differently. Still, it gives you a fair idea what a crackerjack of a sight it must have been when it was built. Locals believe in pre-partition times it used to be a dharamshala. Not surprising at all!

Move ahead and in two shakes of a lamb’s tail you will reach Lyari’s most talked about spot: Kakri Ground. It is an intriguing spot. Young Lyari boys can be seen playing football with consuming passion on the sandy ground. The Mahabat Khanji Road side has the entrance to the facility with a wall running along it. On its opposite end there are concrete slab seats for spectators; a contemporary building fills the gap between the two ends, and the side facing that building has the remaining portion of the wall which runs along the main road to complete the whole squarish area of the ground.

The senior spectators who come to Kakri Ground are no regular Joes. They brim with conventional wisdom. According to one of them, ‘kakri’ is a distorted version of the word kankari (pebbly). He thinks in the beginning the ground had nothing but kankarian, which can be found underneath the sandy surface. The original name of the ground was Mohammad Ali Park.

The intersection of the roads next to Kakri Ground brings into view a splendid example of pre-independence work of stonemasonry. Right at the corner a fine, fine building called Dada Mansion stands tall. Indeed, it’s not a patch on what it was, let’s say, 63 years back, but even in the second decade of the 21st century the designs, the carvings and the shape of its doors, windows and balconies can measure up to any of Karachi’s old classical structures.

Though three or four buildings on the other side of Mahabat Khanji Road, opposite the Ronaq-i-Islam College, are not as old as the structures mentioned above, they were certainly made prior to Pakistan’s inception on the global map. And their present condition makes them look much older than they actually are.

Architect Arif Hasan says, “There are four kinds of old buildings in Lyari. (1) Buildings made of matti which existed till 1996 (2) Structures made of hammer-dressed stone (3) Buildings made during the affluent Karachi period of mid-19th century with chiseled stone, classical elements etc (4) and the ones built in the 20th century having modernist elements.”

After you are done with your visit to Lyari, Charles Baudelaire might show up and whisper this in your ear, “The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous — but we do not notice it.”

mohammad.salman (at) dawn.com

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Shandur festival 2012 from 1st week of July

APP has reported that Shandur Polo festival, for the year 2012 will be  will be held from first week of july. Shandu Polo Festival is  organized at the Shandur pass at about 12000 fee above sea level making it the highest polo ground of the world known.

It is expected that many local and foreign tourists will attend the festival. Besides polo matches, there will also take place the events of Tug of War, Paragliding and Musical Chairs and many other activities featuring Chitral & Gilgit culture.

Talking to APP the Official said that stern security measures have already been put in place in view to thwart any untoward incident. The government of Khyber Pukhtunkhwa has invited the newly-wed British Royal couple to the famous Shandur Polo tournament. The chief minister of the Khyber Pukhtunkhwa province, Haider Hoti has officially confirmed the invitation to Prince William and Princess Kate to watch final of Shandur Polo tournament in Chitral on July 9th. Shandur Polo Tournament is an annual festival held every July at the Shandur Pass in the northern areas of Pakistan where rival teams from Chitral and Gilgit play.

The tournament is held on Shandur Pass, the highest polo ground in the world at just under 4000 meters where the Hindukush, Pamir and Karakoram ranges meet. The Shandur pass is about 3738 meter above sea level lies midway between Chitral and Gilgit. The colorful festival also includes folk music and dancing and used to attract large number of foreigners in the past when militancy comparatively low in Pakistan. History of Shandur festival The polo tournament, played on Shandur Top, known as “playing on rooftop of the world”, had been a regular feature since centuries in the area.

The area has hosted this game since the past 800 years and history has it that in 1920s, King of the area has started the famous tournament for promotion of integration between different areas under his realm. He ordered the ruler of Moskuj (the Hindukush highland between Chitral and Gilgit), hold the polo tournament between the best players for the purpose. In the past the local Mehtars , Mirs and Rajas (administrators, or rulers of states) were patrons of polo

Travel &Culture Services has made special program to organise a memorable journey to Shandu pass during the festival.  Please check our Shandur Polo festival tour section for details

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