A horrible incident took place in the area of Alai in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where six students and one teacher, going to school were stranded in the cable car early in the morning , when the cable was broken all of a sudden and it tangled in the air between two hills , above the approximately 2000 feet deep ditch.
The network of deadly chairlifts and cable cars is ranging widely throughout the hilly areas of the country. These lethal chairlifts took lives of several in the past.
Some years back the same kind of incident took place at Ayubia, Murree where a tourist family containing four members was tangled in the chairlift but luckily saved by the local papulation as the depth of the dyke below it was not so vast.
A similar incident took place in Malam Jabba Swat, where a newly married couple lost their lives about a decade ago.
It is the need of the hour that these timeworn chairlifts, where people use them on a daily basis to go other places as they have not any other option, should be replaced with the hanging bridges.
As India, Bhutan and other regional countries have extended the net of hanging bridges in the hilly areas and got rid of the old system of carrying the people through the cable cars.
Where the chairlifts and cable cars are being used for the tourism purpose, these carriers should be updated and state of art technology should be utilized to protect the lives of the tourists.
As a matter of fact, here in Pakistan there is not any proper planning for improving the facilities to the people and if there is any planning, the development funds were embezzled. So the years old system could not be replaced. Where the chairlifts or cable cars were installed nearly two or three decades ago, even their cables have become outdated and rusty with the passage of time, but they were not switched over to modern technology which resulted in these kinds of dreadful incidents.
In our country, a culture of earning good money from a century old gadget and not spending even a single penny on it has become so common in every field that the beneficiaries of the system are just passing time with it even without considering that the old system is dangerous for the lives of its users.
There should also be a legislation that the machinery and instrument used for public service should be inspected every year by the technical teams at various places and if it approves its working for the next year then it should be allowed to continue its service otherwise it should be stopped until it is transferred to modern technology.