These are my cheat cards; I'll refer to these to figure out where I am during the course of my talk.
OK, so this is my first question to you all: Where is Lahore?
Can you please raise your hands? How many know where Lahore is?
Nobody here? We are sitting in Lahore. I'd expect a better outcome.
Alright, good, good! Here is the thought for the day, this is something that I've been lately thinking of:
that say in 2050, if ever, and when, Lahore's drainage issues are resolved,
and we no longer have what is standing on the roads after it rains, after the monsoon rains,
maybe in 2050, we can preserve some regions, say for, as a theme park, for nostalgia's sake, for historic reference's sake.
What we can do is that, probably have boat rides in Shah Aalmi; water-scoooter rides, Lakshmi Chowk, 3 feet of water;
M M Alam Road, 2-3 feet of water stored or sunk during the last rains, kayaking or canoeing, would be a great idea, I think!
There, this is my favorite, so you know there is black-water rafting in Samnabad's Dirty Canal (Ganda Naala).
It just, you know, it just burst its banks a while back. So, with that thought, here's the next question: How many of you know where Karachi is?
Question? Hands? Everyone?....some people over here don't know where Karachi is: strange! Bad...very bad!
Anyway, next question: do you know where Hussaini is, Hussaini? How many have actually heard of it? Hussaini?...One person?
Anyone else? Anyone else? Anyone else? OK, so Hussaini...anyway, move on...you know where Karachi is, you don't know where Hussaini is.
Let's see how many of you know where Attabad is?....one, two, three, four...alright,good! So, the media outreach did actually help.
Well, I didn't know where Attabad was. This was somewhere mid-March, I'd heard that on January 2nd, there was a landslide at Attabad.
The entire village fell into River Hunza, down below. 20 people died and subsequently a lot of people were cut off.
But, I, honestly, that day the first time I heard about it, I didn't really care much about it.
I want you all, right now, you know, want to do a little exercise with me: I want you all to close your eyes, for 15 seconds,
and try to feel, what people might have felt in Attabad, when that landslide took place.
Please close your eyes. I actually did this, close your eyes: so your feet are firmly on the ground right now.
But suddenly, the ground is shaking. It's shaking really, really bad; it's moving, you have a sensation of free fall, you're falling.
How do you arrest your fall? Do you try to hold on to something? Anything you hold on to, is just moving with you.
What do you do? What do you feel like?
Did that make sense?
Can you imagine, can you empathize with the people, what happened over there?
I did this exercise with my wife, and next day, I was suddenly surprised.
Heck, I don't know where Attabad is; how can I help those people?
How can I feel for what they've felt?
And yet, that is what those people felt that day.
Just for reference again, this is where Attabad is.
That little, small red circle is where Attabad is. This is a zoomed-out version. This is somewhere in Hunza.
A further zoomed-out version, the lower red dot that you see over here
This is where Islamabad is, a couple of hundred miles.
No wonder we didn't know where Attabad was.
So, then I started hearing that there is a lake, a big lake behind the blockade
and it was filling up fast. It was about 8 to 9 km long at that time
and I was wondering, wow, this is a huge lake.
This is a major river, in the mountains, blocked.
It's filling up with water, yet we are all sitting comfortably, and we don't know about it.
So a friend of mine and I, I am involved, as Khurram mentioned, in Google Map Maker project.
So I contacted some of the people back in Google, and I said, "Guys, can you please help me out?
We want some imagery. It's been 3 months.
The lake is filling up fast, and yet, nobody really cares to look into it.
There is no pressure on the government. Why is that so?
These guys helped. And what happened is that, Jibran and I
then subsequently decided that to make this information more public
to tell the stories of the people
who have lost their houses, whose villages have been sunk.
They could actually see their villages sinking inch by inch everyday.
Maybe if we can involve photos, pictures etc from those people,
Maybe we can make the others empathize with them.
And you know, maybe make the government actually start moving.
So here's a brief message from Jibran and he'll tell you exactly what we did here
"In January 2010, Hunza Valley suffered this devastating landslide, which then left a massive destruction,
and surrounding areas to severe risk.
This incident resulted not only in blocking the river, but also wiping off the whole village of Attabad
and Aainabad village to sink in artificial lake. Now situation of such kind demands serious attention,
and utmost help. It is a fact that great attention only comes with well-made awareness.
Keeping that in mind, we came up with an idea to put most available, useful and updated information at one place,
so it can be accessed easily by anybody to facilitate the relief efforts on ground. This single page wesbite was built with an aim to
respond to queries regarding affected area details, like water flow information, location of medical and IDP camps, at further risk areas,
updated maps for transportation, bridge status, news updates and so on. While gathering all this information to put it at one place,
there were some sources where we had to dig manually to find required information, such as a daily one page update from NDMA
and weather forecast from MET Department. Thanks, but no thanks to an unfortunate IT infrastructure, that we still have to
update this information manually on daily basis. And so, there were organizations that voluntarily jumped in to help by sharing their information
and data with us to make it available more broadly, to more people. We really appreciate the efforts, and so the others,
wherever they have used this information when needed. International organizations have helped us a lot throughout the process
to maintain up-to-date technical information at a very high level. Google and NASA helped us providing the latest
satellite imageries of the area. While Google Map Maker provided up-to-date maps powered by local community contribution.
UNOSAT and UNITAR, sub-departments of United Nations, provided us most accurate GIS data for lake formation and expansion.
The most powerful and helpful resource was daily updated local information, that was only made possible by a local volunteer, a GIS specialist,
Ali Rahmat Muzaffar. This gentleman helped us in maintaining the information like GIS data, including the location and details of
IDP and medical camps, and the facilities available in there. The status of submerged villages, bridges, roads and public properties,
public locations at the risk of sudden flood from lake. And this all has been entirely on daily basis.
This way of helping out relief efforts has been strongly appreciated by our visitors, who grew from around 1000 visitors in the very first month
to nearly double that amount in next month. Visitors from mobile phones have extended the area of interest and thinking,
for us, in such projects, giving us new ways to think in future."
Alright, so Ali Rahmat Muzaffar, he was our primary source of information. He belonged to Hussaini. This was the village which sunk
under the lake that is still over there. That lake is 21 or upto 25 km long, depending on whose estimate you pay heed to.
So, so we had a dilemma here. So, we eventually somehow managed to build this great product here.
Any one of you who wants to know where to direct aid, where to send relief supplies etc can log onto the website
and you'll have a daily update that how many women, men, children at a certain IDP camp?
Are these bridges at risk? Have they been washed away? etc. But the other problem we had, and that was something that disappointed me a bit,
that while we were looking for all this information, the local organisations which held that information
were not forthcoming with that information. So, they would say, "Yes we are aware of the disaster. We are doing everything we can.
Yes, we have all the data, thankyou very much. Why would you want the data? Thankyou very much." So that was a stumbling block that we came
again and again. Some of the organisations mentioned here, they were either private, or not Pakistani organisations.
And they helped in some form or the other, but the primary data was not coming from them.
This brings me to this other point that why is it that information in Pakistan is so closely held, as a secret?
It's not shared. It's public information, you know. I should know if I want to, you know, help out someone, where I should be directing my aid.
Probably the government also was a victim of that. Maybe because we didn't know what was happening,
we as citizens were not able to pressurize the government into start moving, actually making a difference.
I think it was in about May, when the government started panicking, saying, oh, the lake is this long,
if the banks burst, Tarbela Dam's gone! We have to do something. But you know, had we had this information, this might have been earlier as well.
That brings me to NIMBY, Not In My Back Yard. Maybe that was what we were facing as well.
Since I didn't see it, I didn't know where Attabad was, I didn't really care. Maybe the government, because of that was not effective as well.
So how do we do, you know, we have to make, we have to mandate that information should be shared, amongst us, amongst the common public.
You know, the public can do something or the other with it. Take a look at this, this is a map of Lahore,
that I along with hundreds of thousands of volunteers have built. Just imagine that if you can put a lot of
information on these maps, say, for example, if you can see all the regions which are low-lying on this map,
as an ordinary citizen, you can go and question, that instead of building that new road, why aren't you fixing my area?
I will be flooded next time it rains. Maybe you can see where fresh water is being piped, what quantities of fresh water are being piped.
You might be able to see disparaties in that, that maybe these areas of Lahore, the older areas of Lahore do not get as much pure water
as some of the more newer localities of Lahore. You know, we have to somehow address that.
But how do we address that until and unless we can make the information publicly available?
What we need is, cheat cards again, that's why I referred to these in the beginning, that public has to has a reference point which they can
immediately go and look at, and say, OK, so there will be no electricity at my home.
I would want LESCO or whatever the other distribution companies are, to make this information available,
and stick to it; they should have a one month schedule. Maybe, you can refer to that map over here,
and say, OK, so I'm gonna visit my friend over there, 8 to 9, Defence, DHA sector XYZ. There is no power, maybe I should plan around that.
Why can't I do that today? The irony is that a lot of us are not informed about our right to information.
This is from the 18th Amendment, Article 19-A, Right to Information: Every citizen shall have the right to have access to information in all matters
of public importance. I believe water, I believe power, I believe a lot of other issues are of public importance.
I once went and asked for a map, or the master-plan of Lahore. I was told, "Thankyou very much. That is confidential information.
You can't have access to it." Why not? I live in Lahore. I want to know what you are doing with it. Can't you tell me that?
I didn't think so. These guys didn't want to do that. So the idea here is that we have to take this thing to heart.
We have to, from now on, whenever this becomes effective, have to start questioning that guys please, let us know what you are doing.
Yeah, look at this image. This image is from a popular science magazine of 1925,
probably Manhattan, New York. These guys were thinking back then that 25 years down the line, these are the problems we're gonna have:
so they have three-tiered layers of roads. That we are going to have congestion, we are going to manage it.
But right now, if I don't know about the problems and if I don't know about what's being done to mitigate that, how can I create a solution?
So our collective genius here requires that we create a vision for Lahore, for Punjab, for Pakistan.
And that's something that I think, is not existing. Why is it not existing?
Because I see, that it's too much of an effort to run down, or run after public govt. servants
and ask them for information. How do I help that?
We have to start asking questions. You know, we have to say, so alright, you did this,
what is the justification for this decision? Let me know. Please share the data that you have. There is a lot of data out there
and there are lot of innovative people out there, people with a lot of time on their hands, who can do wonders with that data.
With that thought, I leave you and I hope that this challenge would be taken up and maybe you know, in a few month's time,
or a year's time, we can atleast create some basic services that can help the common man.
Help me, help the problems that I have, help the problems that you have.
And I'd like to collaborate with some of you, if you are interested in that.
So, with that, thankyou so much for lending your ear.