THERE was a time in Pakistan when public space carried an unwritten discipline. Streets were not perfect, systems were not efficient, and cities were not immaculate but there was a shared sense of how one ought to behave in front of others. Social boundaries were rarely written, but they were clearly felt. Children absorbed manners not from textbooks but from what they saw adults do every day.
Travel today on Motorway or walk through any busy bazaar, hospital corridor, public office, bus stand, or community park, and a troubling pattern emerges. People throw trash from car windows without hesitation. Plastic bottles, wrappers, leftover food, and tissues scatter across roads that were built with public money. Men can be seen by roadsides, in markets, and on footpaths urinating openly in full public view, while families, women, and children walk past. Walls become spittoons. Corners become toilets. Public spaces, meant to be shared, are treated as if they belong to no one.
What is more disturbing is not the act itself, but the absence of shame. There is no attempt to hide. No discomfort. No apology. No awareness that such behaviour violates the dignity of others who must occupy the same space. This is not a problem of poverty. Nor is it merely a problem of illiteracy.
Pakistan today has more schools, more colleges, more universities, and more degree holders than at any point in its history. Literacy rates have improved. Urbanization has expanded. Exposure to global norms through media and travel has increased. Yet public behaviour has, paradoxically, worsened. The contradiction is stark: education has expanded, but civic sense has shrunk.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped teaching the difference between being educated and being civil. There was a time when lighting a cigarette in front of an elder was considered disrespectful. Today, it happens casually in homes, markets, and even in the presence of children. Once, when elders entered a room, people stood up instinctively. Conversations paused. Language softened. Today, phones remain in hands, heads do not rise, and voices do not lower. Respect, once reflexive, now feels optional.
Public decency is no longer socially enforced. And that is the heart of the crisis. A society does not maintain standards because of laws alone. It does so because people correct one another silently through social expectation. When someone threw garbage on the road, others stared disapprovingly. When someone misbehaved publicly, they felt embarrassed. That invisible pressure kept behaviour within limits. Today, that collective correction has disappeared. No one says anything. No one expects anything. No one feels accountable.
The result is visible everywhere: in how we drive, how we queue (or do not queue), how we treat public property, how we speak in public spaces, how we behave in hospitals, parks, markets, and offices. We blame institutions for decay, but institutions operate within the culture we create. A road can be cleaned every morning, but if thousands feel no hesitation in dirtying it by afternoon, the problem is not sanitation but social conditioning. Toilets can be built, but if people still prefer walls and sidewalks, the issue is not infrastructure but attitude.
Laws can be written, but if shame has vanished, enforcement becomes impossible.
This decline did not happen overnight. It happened slowly, through indifference passed from one generation to the next. Children grow up watching adults spit on roads, litter in public, shout in hospitals, ignore queues, and disrespect shared spaces. They learn not from civics books but from lived example. What they see becomes what they consider normal. And normal is drifting dangerously downward.
This is not nostalgia for an ideal past. Pakistan was never flawless. But there was a baseline of social restraint that made public life bearable.
That baseline is eroding. The tragedy is that we notice it, complain about it, yet continue contributing to it in small, daily ways. We want clean cities without changing our habits. We want disciplined traffic without disciplining ourselves. We want respectful youth without modelling respect. We want order in public life without practicing order in private conduct. Civic sense is not taught through campaigns alone. It is transmitted through imitation.
If a father throws trash from a car window, a child learns that roads are dumping grounds. If adults relieve themselves in open spaces, children learn that privacy and decency are negotiable. If elders are treated casually, children learn that respect is outdated. And once a society stops feeling embarrassed by bad behaviour, decline accelerates. The real question is uncomfortable and that when did we stop feeling ashamed? This is not the responsibility of the government alone. No ministry can legislate manners into people. No department can deploy enough staff to monitor every street corner. The restoration of public decency begins at the most ordinary level as how individuals behave when no one is watching. Because someone is always watching: the next generation.
If we do not recover this sense of shared responsibility for public space, no amount of development, infrastructure, or education will save us from living in increasingly unpleasant cities and coarser social environments. A society is recognized not by how loudly it speaks of progress, but by how quietly its people respect the space they share. And until that returns, the real erosion will not be of roads or walls but of the culture that once held them together.
—The writer is PhD in Political Science, and visiting faculty at QAU Islamabad.
