Chitral Airport: A Potential Launching Pad for Accelerated Development – By: Dr. Mir Baiz Khan
Chitral Airport, from this writer’s perspective, is a critical infrastructural asset that can accelerate the pace of social, cultural, and more urgently needed economic development in the area. This can happen only if its current decaying state is halted by modernizing its operational services to enhance the quality of service and reclaiming the portion of its landscape that it has lost to the Chitral River and redesigning it as a public space. In doing so, the Chitral Airport will become not only an engine for fast-tracked development but also a public leisure park with necessary public amenities serving the increasing population of the Chitral town area and beyond, and adding to the existing beauty of the Capital City and attracting a large number of visitors from within and outside the country. Some readers may think that the writer is daydreaming about something beyond any possibility of realization. In his conviction, the thought is not a fantasy, but a pragmatic solution to a lingering development problem of Chitral. Being a mountain region, Chitral does not produce anything in substantial volume to export to the bigger market whether inland or out of countries. What Chitral is blessed with is its natural environment. Promoting tourism and the leisure industry can be the only reliable source of development. This project can have a trampoline impact in accelerating the pace of development. What is needed is that Chitralis of all backgrounds can join hands to make it a possibility, harnessing their common strengths and resources.
Chitral in ancient times, was a country a small kingdom of its own as was the case with other valleys adjacent to it sporadically coming under the sphere of influence of major kingdoms like the one in China. Living in isolation, Chitralis developed a community life revolving around a critical value of mutual support and a collective approach to common issues. This system was based on the one-for-all and all-for-one principle and worked well for centuries. This can be explained with an example of life in one village as it used to be until recently. This will illustrate the time-tested value of cooperation, a collective approach to common problems is as relevant today as it has been since ancient times in a more sophisticated sense.
During the four seasons of a year, men of the village would come together to accomplish a task for a common purpose. These collective actions would include clearing the channels to water the growing crops, making temporary bridges at various points on the main river when the crops are harvested and water flow of the main river receding to a minimum level to transport the harvested crops to the village. Besides a host of other activities that required to be accomplished within specific timeframe such as those related to seeding, manure transporting to enrich the soil of the fields, harvesting crops, planting rice and gathering wild fodders and transporting them to the storage. Missing the time period for each of these activities meant the possible loss of second crops and wild fodders resulting in a shortage of food for people and livestock alike. This lynchpin value has eroded over time. It can be revived at an advanced level and in a contemporary sophisticated way to promote development goals and achieve greater results to put Chitral on the world map as a place of great attraction. This writer is convinced that Chitral Airport area has this potential.
As the value of collectivity served communities in the ancient world until relatively recently, it can work even better today if goodwill, cooperation, and desire to make Chitral a better and more exciting place for now and future. We, Chitralis, can draw inspiration from others’ experiences. One such inspiring example is Swati people. Their positive attitude towards themselves and their self-help initiative, despite the crushingly destructive forces that were unleashed on them in recent years, they have stood firmly on the ground with an unshakable resolve to rebuild what has been destroyed as the picture above shows (Picture by Fazal Khaliq, author of the Dawn article). Fazal Khaliq’s article about Swatis helping themselves published in Dawn on May 15, 2023, invites us all to reflect and learn from this example in order to rejuvenate the traditional value of collectivity and cooperation around a common cause by supplementing the government programs and projects rather than being totally dependent on them. The people of Swat have suffered terribly from the disasters caused both by man and nature and yet their resilience, courage, self-respect, and mindfulness of ensuring to protect the source of their livelihood is an example worth emulation. Terrible as their experience has been, indeed, their response to it is inspiring.
The man carrying the three-layer load on his back speaks volumes about the courage, dedication, bravery, and self-respect not just of the person but of the Swatis in general. The writeup states: ‘Frustrated with the government’s lack of urgency, hotel owners in Kalam have joined hands with the locals to restore the flood-damaged road which links the popular tourist site with the rest of the country.’ It further mentions that ‘despite repeated protests, the federal and provincial governments remained indifferent,’ and goes on to quote a social activist saying that ‘When we got disillusioned with the government, we start collecting money and then made the road usable,’ ‘we have now rented two excavators and a few trucks.’ This they have done on a self-help basis to make the road useable for buses and trucks so that the traders and tourists could come to the picturesque region. How amazingly this initiative exemplifies the beautiful verse of the Holy Quran: ‘Verily never will God change the condition of a people until they change it themselves ((إنّ اللّه لا يغير ما بقومٍ حتّى يغيروا ما أنفسهم.
Chitral Airport has been neglected for too long, letting to be left barely with its running strip and a modest old building accommodating airport administrative staff of PIA and the Civil Aviation. The writer has highlighted its conditions in his earlier article captioned ‘Chitral Airport: An Untapped Asset,’ published in Chitral Times. The larger size of land than the existing airport which was once part of the airport landscape, a green area with self-grown bushes and trees as the writer remembers when he was a student in Chitral State High School, has been washed away year after year by the Chitral River. Now there is nothing but a vast sandy area and with receding water, the accumulated sand is loaded on trucks and taken away for block-making and construction. Hundreds of truckloads of sand being removed every year pave the way for the river water to destroy the remaining land and it is possible that eventually, in case the river for some reason changes its course, it can reach the very landing point of the runway.
Chitral is a picturesque area of northwestern Pakistan and a dwelling of 414,000 people. It is situated centrally among all its adjacent regions, namely Gilgit-Baltistan to the east, Kunar, Badakhshan, and Nuristan provinces of Afghanistan to the north and west, and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa’s districts of Dir and Swat to the south. The entire region is mountainous with an amazing variety of natural beauty and biodiversity with rich fauna and flora, many snow-clad tall mountain peaks, and abundant fruit-laden orchards deep in the valleys. since ancient times, adventurous travelers, hunters, mountaineers, and many more have been attracted to the area because the world outside knew very little about the region until the end of the 19th century. The region, after coming under the British-India administration, attracted many travelers, government officials, and military personnel to write about the place and the people of the region.
Among them was G. W. Leitner, a British anthropologist who gave a common name to the numerous different indigenous tribes of the area calling them Dard and their region as Dardistan. While politically new boundaries were drawn and the twentieth century emerging each new nation-state receiving a slice of the region has not affected its natural beauty and its tourist attraction. From Chitral one can easily cross over to any of its adjacent regions on a vehicle, by air, and even on foot as the writer did once when returning from one of his Central Asian research trips. The author left Sanglich, the last village on the Afghanistan side at two o’clock in the early morning and reached Shah Salim the first village Chitral on the Pakistan side at nine o’clock in the evening. By air, it will take minutes to reach the adjacent region’s airports as this writer has given details in his first article. The potential for accelerated development of Chitral lies in the development of its airport and landscaping of its surrounding areas, along the Chitral River bank side.
As is clear from the picture of the airport above that a vast area is turned into a sandy marshland. This area, if reclaimed and developed with proper planning can become an economically bustling recreational area. Besides the possibility for the extension of the airport, the area can also be an immensely enabling space for healthy leisure activities for the citizens in this capital city where scarcity of land is becoming acute day by day. Here is how. Constructing an embankment, beginning at the western end branching off from Garamchashma Road, and stretching all along the river flow to the newly constructed bridge reconnecting with Garamchashma Road at the eastern end of the airport will reclaim an enormous size of the washed-out landscape. Constructing a ten-meter-wide embankment along the river will not only protect the vast area of reclaimed land behind it but also can become a bustling leisure commercial area with at least a five-kilometer-long stretch of walking area. For commercial, entertainment, and cultural activities, installing Stalls, canopies, and benches, and serving food and beverages will attract people of all ages.
In particular, the variety of indigenous dishes can be a source of delight for the people visiting from outside Chitral. Late Shahzada Muhammad Husamul-Mulk’s book khwan-i-Chitral, published by Anjuman-i-Taraqi-i-Khowar mentions the local dishes in detail. Local artists, musicians, singers, and handicraft producers will have space to promote Chitral culture, develop their skills, and have their skills-related activities as their source of income. This will boost greatly the local economy.
The reclaimed land can be developed as a park with necessary amenities where families can come to have leisure time. It will be a park of its kind in the region accommodating hundreds of people at a time. From a health and family perspective, Citizens along with their families and friends have a non-threatening space to walk and spend quality leisure time with them. Tourists would love to walk along the Chitral River enjoying its cooling waves and experiencing the taste of a variety of local traditional food. The area has the potential to attract a minimum of seven to ten thousand people visiting on a daily basis. If this vision, as a multi-year project, is translated into a reality, Chitral Airport certainly will become a launching pad for accelerated development.
