State derives its legitimacy from its ability to safeguard its people from preventable harm—whether arising from disease, unsafe environments, violence or systemic neglect. In ‘Shehla Zia vs Wapda’ (1994), the Supreme Court of Pakistan declared that the right to life includes the right to a healthy and safe environment, and preventive measures should be taken to ensure the safety and security of citizens. If that is the standard of care and precaution mandated by law, why is the state indifferent to nearly 400,000 citizens who suffer dog-bites each year, resulting in around 1,000 preventable deaths?

Trapped in a cycle of post-accident reactive responses, we push for dog-bite care units, dog-bite emergency departments, dog-bite vaccines and dog-bite training programmes. While all these measures are important, we fail to address the root cause—hundreds of uncontrolled stray dogs, many infected with rabies, that roam our streets and towns, scavenging through scattered garbage and overflowing kachra kundis. Coupled with nearly 18,000 newborns arriving each day, with many destined to inhabit the same streets rather than sit in classrooms, this becomes a grim combination of painful bites and preventable deaths.

Our leaders spend billions on self-publicity, luxury Fortuners and embarrassingly extended foreign junkets, but do not have the money or mind to protect the lives of ordinary citizens. All that is needed is a fleet of vans in every town, each staffed by two trained workers to humanely capture and transport stray dogs to purpose-built rehabilitation facilities. A long metal or fiberglass pole with a sliding cable loop at the end is the simplest method to safely guide (trap) a dog into a transport vehicle. Once admitted to a rehabilitation facility, the remaining stages—commonly called TNVR (trap, neuter, vaccinate, and tag)—can be carried out in an organised manner. Over time, this approach would eliminate the population of street dogs, prevent further breeding and enable the remaining dogs to age out without replacement.

A reactive firefighting approach has also landed Pakistan in the category of the last two countries where polio continues to persist. Most regions of the world were certified polio-free decades ago; the remaining persistent reservoirs of wild polio now exist only in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Despite receiving more than $3 billion in donor support, Pakistan, with 31 polio cases reported in 2025, remains far from becoming a polio-free country. This persists despite successive nationwide campaigns delivering repeated doses of the oral polio vaccine to children—campaigns that have cost the lives of more than 150 dedicated polio workers. Harsh as it may sound, until we confront the root causes, polio will continue to cripple our children and shame our collective conscience.

The continued recurrence of polio cases ought to be of no surprise in a country that discharges nearly 99 percent of its raw sewage into open drains, ponds, rivers, lakes and the sea. As a result, the faecal-oral transmission cycle, where germs from human or animal faeces enter another person’s mouth (largely by drinking contaminated water), continues unabated. Thus, as long as untreated sewage flows freely and clean drinking water is out of reach for most citizens, escaping the clutches of polio will remain an unrealistic and distant aspiration.

Had even half the funds spent on polio drops been directed towards sewage treatment and universal access to clean drinking water, Pakistan might have escaped the dubious distinction of remaining one of the last two polio-endemic countries. There are simple, indigenous and low-cost solutions such as sewage treatment in ‘constructed wetlands’, that could be developed across the country in a matter of weeks and without foreign funding. Why must we continue to leave our poorest and most vulnerable children and adults exposed to life-threatening dangers such as dog-bites, rabies, and polio while the rest of us live in comfort and safety?

Pakistan cannot look forward to becoming a progressive, citizen-friendly state without eliminating the totally preventable deaths and diseases caused by faeces-laden water and rabies-infected dogs. These might appear to be dull and mundane issues, but they require far greater dexterity and determination as compared to distributing 1,000 pink scooties, 10,000 laptops and one million ration bags (at taxpayers’ expense). Were our leaders to spend more time inside the country than abroad, they might finally be able to reflect on the underlying causes of these unspoken tragedies and implement corrective actions to prevent their recurrence.

-Dawn(Pakistan)/ANN