Highlights
- Australian citizen Tariq Khan has been voluntarily cleaning up various parts of Pakistan for eight years
- He lived in Sydney for 18 years before moving back to Pakistan 2010
- Mr Khan aspires to see his home country as clean and green as Australia
When British High Commissioner to Pakistan Christian Turner tweeted a picture of himself with a couple of garbage bags which he had filled with litter during a hike on Islamabad’s Margalla Hills, the tweet went viral and triggered a debate on social media about fixing responsibility on public sanitation.
On the contrary, an Australian, who has been collecting litter from the same Margalla Hills for nearly a decade, has gone unsung all this while.
Tariq Khan is an Australian citizen who lived in Australia for 18 years before returning to Pakistan.
Since the last eight years, he has been running a 'Clean and Green Pakistan' campaign. He told SBS Urdu that he has run more than a dozen such campaigns in Margalla Hills alone.
"I have been undertaking the same exercise as the British High Commissioner in Margalla Hills for so long, but it went unnoticed," he said.
Mr Khan says that he has been running cleanliness campaigns in other parts of Pakistan too.
An IT professional, he has been at it since he moved back to Pakistan in 2010 to look after his parents.
"I always wanted Pakistan to be as clean as we have seen in the First World," reasoned Mr Khan, who lived in Sydney before returning to Pakistan.
A group of volunteers after cleaning Margalla Hills with Islamabad's Deputy Commissioner Hamza Shafqaat (fourth from left). Source: Twitter/Hamza Shafqaat
He is keen on having his work acknowledged by government agencies and also being given an opportunity to work closely with them.
Apart from Pakistani social media users, the British High Commissioner's tweet about cleaning up litter in Margalla Hills, elicited a response from Islamabad's Deputy Commissioner Hamza Shafqaat too. He was amongst the first officers to react by inspecting the place mentioned by Mr Turner.
Mr Shafqaat was of the opinion that the hills are cleaned on a regular basis and usually, wildlife staff are deployed to do that. But he lauded the efforts of individuals like Mr Khan who do that voluntarily.
“I also run a clean-and-green campaign voluntarily to tidy up different parts of Islamabad,” Mr Shafqaat added.
Tariq Khan during his Clean and Green Pakistan campaign. Source: Supplied by Tariq Khan
Responding to the question why litter remains scattered around despite such campaigns, Mr Shafqaat said, "bins remain empty while people throw litter on the ground, which makes it difficult to clean on a daily basis.
“Our staff restricts people from taking snacks and drinks to the hills to keep them clean,” he says.
According to Sustainability , an international journal of environmental, cultural and social sustainability of human beings, the total waste generation of Islamabad is approximately 500–600 tons per day (200,750 tons per year). Sixty percent of the waste is collected by Capital Development Authority and the rest is contracted to private contractors.
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