Lahore entered September with anti-littering squads fanning out across 200 markets and major roads. For now, offenders receive warnings, but from October 1, dropping rubbish in public can bring fines of up to Rs 10,000, while burning waste or tyres can cost as much as Rs 500,000 and, in serious cases, carry imprisonment. Field officers have been barred from receiving cash. For a city that has spent decades complaining about rubbish, the government is finally attaching a price to producing it.
Punjab has earned some standing to become demanding. Suthra Punjab has taken organised collection into towns and villages where municipal sanitation barely existed, backed by enormous public spending, a large vehicle fleet and digital monitoring. Once the state begins collecting waste reliably, the resident who throws it back onto a road or into a drain is no longer merely exposing municipal failure. He is adding another public cost to a service taxpayers have already financed.
That cost becomes painfully visible every monsoon. Plastic bags and household refuse repeatedly find their way into Lahore’s drainage network, forcing public agencies to clear material that should never have entered it. Burning the same waste transfers the burden from the drain to the lungs. The heavier penalties for tyre and waste burning therefore make sense in a province already fighting severe air pollution.
The difficulty is that Suthra Punjab itself has acquired a ledger the government cannot ignore.
Only last week, workers in Faisalabad protested over salaries and dues, saying loader-rickshaw drivers had gone unpaid for one month and 16 days and that Eid honoraria remained outstanding. In July, a sanitation worker in Gujranwala died after setting himself on fire following allegations that a contractor had been illegally deducting from his monthly salary.
The Anti-Corruption Establishment alleged in May that digital records in Faisalabad had been manipulated in a Rs 1 billion fraud, involving ghost workers, inflated container numbers and facilities shown on paper but absent on the ground.
Even the programme’s vehicles have come under scrutiny. On Monday, Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz ordered strict compliance with traffic laws after expressing grief over a minor girl killed by a Suthra Punjab vehicle. The instruction was necessary for reasons larger than traffic management: authority loses moral force when the machinery enforcing public discipline appears exempt from it.
None of this weakens the case for e-challans. It strengthens the case for applying the same standard throughout the system.
The test of Suthra Punjab should never be the number of challans it issues. A successful sanitation system eventually needs fewer fines because government, contractors and citizens have all learned what is expected of them.
