Book & Author
Dr Akhter Hameed Khan: Orangi Pilot Project Reminiscences and Reflections
By Dr Ahmed S. Khan
Chicago, IL
Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan (AHK) was a social development activist par excellence. His nafees personality was an embodiment of religious, social, and ethical values of Indo-Muslim culture. Seven decades ago, AHK left the prestigious Indian Civil Service (ICS) to devote his energies and services for uplifting the lives of the poor and the underprivileged masses. He pioneered social uplift schemes like microcredit and microfinance initiatives, farmers' cooperatives, and rural training. His major achievements in social work include the development of the Rural Development Academy, Comilla, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and Orangi Pilot Project, Karachi.
AHK was born on July 15, 1914, in Agra and passed away on October 9, 1999, in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was buried in Karachi. After graduating from Agra University (1934), he taught at Meerut College (UP) and then in 1936 joined the ICS and spent a major part of his career in East Bengal serving as collector of revenue. He was traumatized by the Bengal famine of 1943. The inadequate response to the famine by the British Raj led AHK to resign from the ICS. For two years he worked as a laborer and locksmith in a village near Aligarh. In 1937 he joined Dr Zakir Hussain’s Jamia Milla, Delhi and taught there for three years.
In 1940, AHK married Hameedah Begum, the eldest daughter of Allama Mashriqi. The couple had three daughters, Mariam, Amina, and Rasheeda, and a son Akbar. In 1966, after Hameedah Begum's death, he married Shafiq Khan and had one daughter, Ayesha.
After the partition of British India in 1947, AHK migrated to Karachi, Pakistan, and then went to East Pakistan to join Comilla Victoria College (CVC) and served as its principal until 1958.
During his stay at CVC, he developed an interest in the initiatives and participation of people at grassroot level. In 1958 he attended training in rural development at Michigan State University (MSU). After his return from MSU, in 1959 he established Pakistan Academy for Rural development at Comilla (later known as Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development) and served as its Director until 1971. Under AHK’s dynamic leadership, the Comilla Cooperative Pilot Project Model provided a methodology of implementation in the areas of agricultural and rural development on the principle of grassroots level cooperative participation by the people. The leadership skills of AHK proved a source of inspiration for Grameen Bank by one of the Comilla Academy students, Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus.
After the fall of Dhaka in 1971, AHK moved to Pakistan and served as a Research Fellow, first at the University of Agriculture, Faisalabad (1971-72), and then at Karachi University (1972-73). In 1973, he went back to MSU and served as a visiting professor until 1979. AHK also served as visiting professor at Princeton University, Harvard University, Oxford University, and Lund University, Sweden.
AHK was fluent in five languages: English , Bengali , Arabic, Persian, and Urdu . He was a poet too; his poetry reflects his passion for serving the poor:
Hazar shaher bassaiye heiN badshahonN nay
Aab aik shaher ghareebonN ko bhi basanay dou!
Thousands of metropolises have been built by the Kings
Let the poor construct a city now!
AHK was a prolific writer; he published a plethora of books and articles. His major works include Safar-e-Amrika ki Diary (1972, A Diary of Travels in America, Urdu), Institutions for Rural Development in Indonesia, Pakistan Academy for Rural Development (1974), The Works of Akhter Hameed Khan, Comilla: Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development (1983), Chiragh aur Kanwal (Collection of poems in Urdu, 1988), Orangi Pilot Project: Reminiscences and Reflections (1996), The Sanitation Gap: Development's Deadly Menace , The Progress of Nations, UNICEF (1997).
AHK received numerous awards including Nishan-e-Imtiaz, Hilal-e-Imtiaz, Sitara-e-Pakistan and Ramon Magsaysay ( Philippines , 1963). After his demise, the government of Pakistan renamed the National Center for Rural Development as Akhtar Hameed Khan National Centre for Rural Development and Municipal Administration .
In 1980 he founded the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP) in Karachi. Again, AHK provided dynamic leadership as the project director, and strived to help needy communities overcome problems of sanitation, housing, health, education, and employment.
Orangi Pilot Project: Reminiscences and Reflections , is a collection of Dr Akhter Hameed Khan’s twenty-four articles and papers which describe the physical and socio-economic condition in settlement of Orangi, and the stakeholders and processes involved in the development of these squatter settlements. AHK has dedicated the book to his wife and daughter: “To my wife Shafiq and daughter Ayesha who have made my old age happy and useful.”
In the introduction, Arif Hasan writes “Akhter Hameed Khan is recognized globally as one of the outstanding social scientists of our age. He is best known as the author of two remarkable and internationally acclaimed community development projects. During the sixties he was the director of the Comilla Project in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. Since 1980 he has been the director of the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP) in Karachi. Orangi is the largest katchi abadi in the city. The two projects deal with very different situations. The Comilla Project was a rural development project in the public sector and was supported by a number of bilateral agencies. The Orangi Pilot project, on the other hand, is an urban project funded by a non-governmental organization (NGO)…. Akhter Hamed Khan’s writings on the Comilla Project have been compiled in six volumes by Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development. However, this is the first attempt to publish some of his articles and papers on the Orangi Pilot Project under one cover…Akhtar Hameed Khan’s reputation as community development expert has completely overshadowed the fact that he is an ardent student of history and a keen observer and commentator on current social, economic, and political affairs…he is a scholar of Persian, Arabic and Pali, who has studied Islamic and Buddhist classics in their original languages…”
In the narrative “Personal Reminiscences of Change,” AHK reminisces about his parents: “My father was born in 1884, He and my mother belonged to middle-class families (shurfa) of Agra, the city of Akbar Badshah, the twin capital of the Mughal Empire, the city of Mir, Ghalib, and Mian Nazeer. My parents were the products of the three-hundred-year-old Mughal culture, an Indo-Muslim synthesis. This old culture in its twilight was absorbing Western influences. During the childhood of my parents Syed Ahmad Khan was still alive, and his reform movement was at its peak, generating fierce controversies, passionately loved, and passionately hated. My father went to Agra College and my mother studied English at home. Syed Ahmad Khan came from the Shurfa of Delhi. He began his career as a junior officer in the Anglo-Indian administration. In 1857 he passed through the trauma of what he called ghadar, and Pakistani historians call the war of liberation. He made an agonizing reappraisal and came to the conclusion that the Muslim shurfa were in dire need of reforms. While their basic spiritual values and religious dogmas were true, their educational and social system had become regressive…Syed Ahmad Khan’s call for scientific enlightenment, sectarian tolerance, and cultural sobriety received, on the one hand, a most positive response. Shurfa of Delhi and Lucknow, Lahore and Peshawar, Patna and Dhaka, Hyderabad and Madras followed him in droves. On the other hand, the reformer was denounced as a self-seeking traitor…”
In the narrative “Koranic Faith and Good Works,” describing “What is Faith?” AHK writes, “Usually we are enchanted by our present life. Faith reveals the transient and illusory nature of our present life (hayat-ud-dunya). It also reveals an abiding reality --- the hereafter (akhirat).” Describing faith, AHK presents a translation of quotations of Holy Koran by A. J. Arberry.
In the narrative “I admired Nietzsche,” AHK writes “I admired Nietzsche for several years and I admired him passionately. I read ‘Thus Spoke Zaathustra’ again and again with delight. I read The Will to Power and Beyond Good and Evil with rapt attention and total agreement. But gradually my mind turned away from his view of life and his scale of values.” Later AHK found solace in Rumi’s poetry of love, peace, and wisdom.
In the narrative “My Mother’s way of Life,” AHK observes, “My mother was born in Agra in 1896. She belonged to a middle-class family. Her father was an officer in the Survey Department. At the age of fourteen she was married to my father, who was a police sub-inspector. After begetting and nursing six children in eleven years she lost her health. But when a seventh child was born, my mother became a full-fledged tuberculosis patient, suffered terribly for six years, and died in 1932. She was then thirty-six years old. Being the eldest son, I was very close to my mother. She was an educated and sensitive person. She used to tell me her views and values, her sad or happy reactions; I used to listen and observe intently. The restrictions and hardships of her way of life are deeply imprinted on my mind. Again and again, throughout my long life, I have pondered over them. First as a husband, and later as a father. I have been forced to compare critically my mother’s way of life with the different ways of my wife and daughters, women of the next two generations…. My mother was not a rebel. She was a faithful follower of traditional norms. As a sacred marriage gift, she had received, along with the Holy Koran, a copy of the Bahisti Zewer. She considered this book a true guide which she tried to follow as far as she could. The Bahisti Zewer minutely described exact methods of performing rituals, emphasized ancient practices of hygiene, gave a hakim’s advice on food or health or sickness, and advocated virtuous norms of social or ethical conduct. Above all it clearly defined the women’s role for Muslim middle class…While middle-class Muslim women like my wife and my daughters have, in conformity with the world-wide feminine trends, modified the Bahisti Zewer role of their own free will, I find that among the lower-class Muslim families of Orangi, the traditional patriarchal pattern of total dependence on the earning power of husband or father is being shattered by the rising cost of living, uncertain unemployment, and heroin. In Orangi, wives and daughters are forced to work by themselves in order to support the family. “
The chapter titled “Address to APWA Ladies,” presents the text of AHK’s keynote address to the All Pakistan Women’s Association (APWA) governing body. The address deals with the problems of the Pakistani women in a historical context and explores the major cause of the decline of the Chinese, Turkish, and Moghul Empires viz a viz their treatment of women. AHK observes, “Before I close, I will make an impertinent remark for which I hope you will excuse me. APWA ladies, your job was to teach, enlighten, and lead. But you have lost a great deal of credibility by ostentatious living. You have provided the traditionalists and their passionate followers a stick to beat you with. Your contemporaries, the leaders of Chinese women’s emancipation, did not commit this mistake. Your behavior has confused emancipation with ostentation. The austerity and dedication of Chinese women has shown the power and glory of pure emancipation. One day you too will get rid of ostentation. You will display the power and glory of pure emancipation, by the grace of God, InshAllah.”
In another narrative “What I learnt in Comilla and Orangi,” AHK observes, “I can sum up what I have learnt in Comilla or Orangi in a few words: The common people, villagers or slum dwellers, farmers, or workers, were living in a difficult period of transition of impotent institutions. The people of Comilla or Orangi were by no means passive. On the contrary, they were struggling very hard; they were masters of the art of survival. Their efforts to tackle their problems became much more fruitful when they were given social and technical guidance and material support…In Orangi and Karachi goths (villages) there was no need for infra-structure subsidies or co-operatives. Roads and transport to the market were already present. Small entrepreneurs could increase production and employment with the help of credit, even without co-operatives, which unfortunately have been hijacked by waderas.”
In chapter titled “A Note on Welfare Work,” AHK states, “Two fundamental principles should be scrupulously followed: (a) the avoidance of any political or sectarian bias, and (b) the observance of a populist point of view, the preference for the needs of the common people.”
Commenting on “Low-Cost Sanitation,” AHK writes, “The assumption of responsibility for internal development by katchi abadi residents drastically reduces the cost, eliminates corruption, speeds up the work, and ensures maintenance.”
In the narrative “Low-Cost House Building,” AHK observes, “If the OPP had more resources it could enlarge both the credit capacity of thallas and the contracting capacity of masons. The OPP kept away from the dalals. They are secret allies of our rulers. It may be dangerous for an NGO to interfering the affairs of development authorities --- official or unofficial.”
In the final narrative titled “Corruption and the Role of Idealists,” AHK observes, “…I believe that I am seeing signs of a rebirth of idealism. In the first place destructive effects of gross materialism, of utterly selfish behavior, have now become too transparent. There is a compulsive demand for reform. Secondly, in my capacity as Director of Orangi Project, I come in contact with many NGO workers and professionals. They appear to me to be very much like the idealists I saw in my youth. They have the same Utopian desire to serve others, to solve real problems, to create a better world --- more kind, more just, more prosperous… Cynics may say that what I am seeing is of no significance. It is only a dotard’s fancy, an ant’s eye view of Pakistan. I cannot argue with cynics. Maybe they are right. But I go on believing that in the coming decades more and more idealists will reappear, and show by their example, how to repair the damage caused by uncontrolled greed, lust, and ambition, how to check corruption and patiently build a deep-rooted infrastructure of social justice and economic prosperity.”
Indeed, Dr Akhter Hameed Khan was a scholar and a social worker par excellence. He has left behind a rich legacy of social service that needs to be emulated by the young generation to promote social equity in society. The best way to keep AHK’s legacy alive would be to establish chairs, scholarships, and internships in his name at departments of social work at various universities.
The book is a must read for all who want to serve needy communities all over the globe by emulating Dr Akhter Hameed Khan’s example. In the epilogue, AHK concludes by saying, “Let us follow the advice of Sheikh Saadi:”
To Kar-i-zamin ra niko skhti
Ke ba asman nez purdakhti
Have you arranged your earthly homes properly?
That you are flying to arrange things in the sky.
