Chitral Press

CHITRAL: As a result of sealing the borders of Chitral with Kunar province of Afghanistan towards the end of last year, the volume of trade activities has constricted to its lowest ebb rendering a number of people jobless. Talking to Chitraltimes.com here on Wednesday, a number of businessmen said that the Kunar province and Nooristan area depended on Chitral for the commodities of daily use and medicines. Haji Muhammad Shifa from Drosh town said that the people of Nooristan and Kunar used to come to the town on daily basis to purchase the commodities including pulses, ghee, rice, sugar and other food items but the process had been stopped after the attck of Taliban on the security check posts in August last. He said that the sale of commodities in the stores of the town has dropped to abysmally low and the shop keepers wait eagerly wait for any customer but to no avail. He said that the owners of the stores had engaged salesmen to assist them in coping with the rush of Afghans customers but this year they have been sacked altogether. The healthcare facilities of Chitral were mostly used by the people from the other side of the border and the sale of medicines from the local market has also dropped. Fakhre Alam, a local distributor of medicines of different national and multi-national pharmaceutical companies, said that his sale has decreased by more than forty percent after the borders have been sealed. He said that the medical store owners used to purchase medicines from the Chitral market due to its proximity to the area and the fact that the patients were also brought here for treatment. A medical practitioner of the city said that in the previous years, his clinic was daily visited by forty to fifty patients but this year the number has never exceeded twenty due to the closure of the borders. The number of outdoor patients has also reduced as per records of DHQ hospital in the absence of patients pouring in from the Afghan areas. The private diagnostic laboratories have also registered a low number of turn out of patients after the borders have been sealed. The administrator of Al-Khidmat diagnostic centre Abdul Haq said that the number of patients attending the centre for x-ray and diagnostic tests has decreased by thirty percent due to the closure of borders. Such were the accounts of the drivers plying on Chitral-Drosh and Arandu routes who have recorded very low number of passengers.