MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

By Ashfaq Fateh, ASSIST News Service – “TOBA TEK SINGH, PAKISTAN (ANS) — Scientists say that, ‘a man or woman cannot live without air, water and food’ as these three elements play a vital role in human life.

Most countries ensure the fundamental rights to its citizens to ensure the availability of all these three elements. Citizens pay taxes to get pure drinking water and other facilities.

However, the story of Christians living in village # 700/42, Pirkadiayana, Tehsil Kamalia, District, Toba Tek Singh, Punjab, Pakistan, is a different one where their supply of water was on the condition that they not only had to pay the required water tax and also a pay a Muslim cleric of a mosque in the village.

In Pakistan, municipal corporations (MC) supply drinking water through their water supply schemes. Underground pipelines have been laid and a citizen applies for the connection and government then connects the house with a water supply, thus the citizen gets drinking water. The bill is collected annually.

In villages and remote areas, the government in installs the water supply system and then asks locals to form their management committees to run the system and develop their own system of collection, time table, repairs, payment of electricity bills and issuing connections. The committees run the system and try to provide water connections without any religious discrimination.

Now ASSIST News Service-Pakistan has come to know about the story of this village where poor Christians have been forced to pay water tax as well to the local Muslim cleric.

ANS-Pakistan decided to highlight this story which shows the miseries faced by Christians and an example of their unity and faith to work together despite the challenges.

The 244 Christian families of Pirkadiayana village paid extra charges to a Muslim cleric from the local Mosque from 1997-2009 to get drinking water…

‘We were forced to accept the demands of the management committee as they were powerful and if we refused to pay, our women and children had to fetch drinking water from miles away and our most of the time was spent in this exercise. Therefore, there was no alternative.'” Read more.