Press release

Lahore’s ‘forgotten citizens’: Access to CNICs for Pakhiwas communities

Lahore, 10 November 2021. At a policy consultation held earlier today, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) presented the key findings of a study examining the obstacles to citizenship for seasonal workers based in and around Lahore, many of whom hail from the nomadic or Pakhiwas community.

The study found that a significant proportion of the Pakhiwas community were unaware of the benefits of computerised national identity cards (CNICs), including the fact that citizenship documents could make them eligible for public healthcare and social safety nets such as the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP). Among other recommendations, HRCP underscored the importance of community-level advocacy to encourage the Pakhiwas community to apply for CNICs and setting up an emergency unit to include nomadic communities in the national census and reporting this data to the human rights ministry to bring them within the citizenship process.

Yawar Abbas Bukhari, the provincial minister for social welfare, assured participants at the consultation that camps had been set up to facilitate registration for vulnerable groups such as the Pakhiwas community and pledged to advocate greater access to social safety nets and citizenship documents for such communities. Provincial assembly member Ayesha Iqbal said that stakeholders such as the Women’s Protection Authority and Women Development Department should be involved in citizenship advocacy drives to increase the number of female beneficiaries of BISP. Zafar Kamal, director-general of the BISP in Punjab, said that it was, however, important to follow the present strategy of linking citizen registration to access to social security.

Mahinder Pall Singh, parliamentary secretary for human rights, recommended that NADRA introduce a means of registering Pakhiwas families that did not require two guarantors—a prerequisite that many families were unable to meet. Dr Shahid Magsi, director of the Epidemics Prevention and Control Programme, said that the provincial health department had never denied access to vaccination to citizens who lacked identity cards. Covid-19 vaccination was a federal matter, he added, and thus warranted a CNIC.