Punjab sold door-to-door collection as proof that government had finally reached every lane; the Faisalabad case shows how contractors turned digital monitoring into invoices for workers, containers and collection points that investigators could not find.
Muhammad Shahid called Faisalabad’s waste helpline, 1139, after rubbish began gathering in Kareem Town before Eidul Azha in June 2025, and three days passed without a sanitation worker arriving. Across Faisalabad, residents were seeing heaps grow beside roads and drains while Care Services Consortium held a three-year municipal contract reported by The News on Sunday to be worth about Rs 7.5 billion a year. The provincial programme promised door-to-door service, GPS-tracked vehicles and digital proof of every completed route, and yet Shahid’s complaint supplied the only record that mattered to his street: the garbage was still there.
Rai Qamar Zaman was among the Care Services Consortium contractors later named in the First Information Report registered by the Anti-Corruption Establishment. The FIR says contractors and Faisalabad Waste Management Company officials manipulated the programme’s digital portal between November 2024 and April 2026 and caused an estimated loss of Rs 1 billion. ACE later told Dawn that it had confiscated the firm’s Rs 600 million surety guarantee, stopped another Rs 400 million payment and frozen Rs 60 million in bank accounts, describing those steps as a 100 per cent recovery. A separate Express Tribune report said investigators recovered cash, property and vehicles worth more than Rs 400 million from arrested suspects. Those are different descriptions of recovery and must not be blended into one number.
The FIR, reported by Dawn, Dunya News and the Express Tribune, documents the entries that released public money. The portal recorded 2,317 waste containers; physical verification found 1,717. The other 600 generated performance scores and payments, and yet no resident could use one because they occupied no street, village or market. The consortium billed 118 waste enclosures while investigators verified 33, recorded three temporary collection points that had never been built, and charged for mini-dumpers while deploying lower-cost loader rickshaws. Express Tribune reported that only 48 loader rickshaws were found in place of the required fleet.
The investigation found another 633 entries on the official worker roster with digital attendance and publicly funded salaries, but no workers behind the names. Pakistan has carried ghost payrolls through schools and health units for decades. Suthra Punjab placed them inside a programme sold on AI analytics, GPS-enabled tracking and live performance scores. A real sanitary worker still had to lift the rotting waste, push the trolley and clear the drain, and yet the monitoring system treated 633 absent bodies as completed labour while the salary money travelled elsewhere.
In Sheikhupura on April 4, 2026, sanitation workers drove tractor-trolleys and loader rickshaws onto Kutchery Road, emptied rubbish outside the Suthra Punjab office and blocked traffic. The protesters, including women who cleaned the city’s streets, told Dawn that they had gone five months without salaries. In Miani, workers closed the Bhera-Malakwal Road over two months of unpaid wages. In Pakpattan, about 200 workers occupied Nagina Chowk after two months without pay; the contractor told Dawn that Sahiwal Solid Waste Management Company owed it Rs 200 million, while the deputy commissioner promised that salaries would arrive soon. These protests occurred in different districts under different contractors, but the worker heard the same explanation each time: payment was stuck somewhere above him.
Faisalabad carried the contradiction further. The Punjab Employees Social Security Institution began legal proceedings in May 2026 over more than Rs 66.5 million in contributions that Care Services Consortium allegedly failed to deposit for about 4,000 sanitation workers in Faisalabad city, Saddar and Tandlianwala. The public contract paid for labour, the portal counted labour and the contractor invoiced labour, and yet the people whose lungs, skin and backs absorbed the work were allegedly denied the social protection attached to their wages.
After the corruption case and termination of the Care contract, Pakistan Labour Qaumi Movement chairman Baba Latif Ansari said 254 sanitary supervisors and 187 loader-rickshaw drivers had been dismissed without salaries for May and eighteen days of June or the Rs 10,000 Eid performance award announced by the deputy commissioner. Suthra Punjab replied that these people had never been authority employees because the contractor had hired them. The province outsourced the workers when responsibility became expensive, and yet it had counted their labour as a provincial achievement when the cameras were running.
On August 20, 2026, the chief minister ordered that Suthra Punjab salaries be paid before the fifth day of every month. The order came after workers had already piled garbage outside an office, closed major roads and spent months asking for wages the programme’s monitoring system was supposed to track, and Punjab could no longer claim it lacked notice.
The official figures describe different things and should not be collapsed into one expenditure total. The programme began with a reported Rs 120 billion allocation, and the Express Tribune reported that its annual budget had risen to Rs 150 billion by September 2025. The Associated Press of Pakistan said in June 2026 that Punjab had “provided” Rs 270 billion for implementation so far and allocated another Rs 170 billion for 2026-27. The Rs 270 billion figure is therefore an official funding claim, not a published audit of money spent. Pakistan Times reported in August 2026 that the authority had collected around Rs 1 billion in waste charges against a Rs 70 billion target, about 1.4 per cent.
Punjab residents finance the programme through the provincial budget and are then asked to finance it again through a garbage tax on homes, shops and markets. Rural areas lacked a collection system, the Excise and Taxation Department lacked the capacity to enforce the urban levy, and families confronting higher electricity bills and food prices received one more demand from the state. If the service failed on their street, they still had to pay someone to remove the waste or live beside it. The reported annual budget reached Rs 150 billion while collections reached around Rs 1 billion, leaving the programme dependent on a provincial treasury already squeezed by federal fiscal pressure and IMF consolidation targets.
Pakistan Times reported on August 15, 2026, that the authority was preparing a new collection plan covering public and private hospitals, railway colonies, the Ring Road Authority, produce markets and private housing societies. An initial survey identified more than 300 private housing schemes in Lahore. The authority failed to collect from the population it promised to serve, so it has moved towards institutions and businesses that are easier to locate and harder to refuse. It has not explained how that plan can close a deficit measured in hundreds of billions of rupees.
Social media did not speak with one voice. Residents of a village outside Gujranwala wrote that a cleaning team and garbage vehicle had reached an area that had never received routine collection, while a Faisalabad resident praised the increase in bins, trucks and workers. Those accounts matter because Suthra Punjab met a real need and, in some places, delivered a service local government had abandoned. A serious investigation does not erase that success to make the corruption easier to narrate.
The complaints carried a harder test because they named a transaction. Video reports published by UrduPoint in December 2025 showed residents saying they cleaned their own surroundings while receiving Suthra Punjab tax bills. Another report in July 2026 showed Lahore shopkeepers displaying sanitation demands as high as Rs 21,000 while pointing to garbage outside. The videos establish what the speakers said and what the camera showed; they do not establish how each bill was calculated, and the authority’s assessment record would be needed to verify that amount. The speakers asked Punjab to identify the service attached to the bill.
In Gulberg, a resident told Dawn in March 2025 that waste collection had become irregular and complaints produced no response. In Chak 90 South near Sargodha, residents told Dawn in May 2026 that workers had remained absent for months, drains had filled and sewage water had reached the foundations of houses. Near Committee Chowk in Rawalpindi, traders and residents began a hunger strike in June 2026 after Suthra Punjab placed a garbage transfer point inside a dense residential and commercial area; Faisal Ali, Sharif Qureshi and Hafiz Sajid Khan said the smell intensified in heat, rain and at night. Collection had reached the neighbourhood, and yet Punjab made disposal the neighbourhood’s burden.
The authority’s own complaint form now offers categories for uncollected waste, open-plot dumping, burning garbage, missing containers, uncovered transport, payroll problems, unremoved animal remains and absent garbage bags. That list is an administrative vocabulary built from recurring failure. Punjab created a digital route for citizens to report the street, but the Faisalabad FIR shows that the other side of the screen could certify a container or worker that physical verification could not locate. The unresolved question is whether a complaint can defeat a contractor’s paid KPI when both enter the same system.
The Faisalabad FIR supplies the clearest account of how officials and contractors could convert a sanitation contract into false attendance, inflated equipment and paid digital scores. Other districts had already reported the same pressure points: missing machinery, unpaid labour, weak field checks and invoices tied to quantities the public could not verify.
The first layer is roster manipulation. M/s Care Consortium, the private contractor, registered sanitary workers on the digital portal who were either non-existent or inactive. Salaries were drawn against these phantom entries and distributed through intermediary cartels, with ACE’s investigation alleging collusion between the contractor and officials at every level of the Faisalabad Waste Management Company: the former CEO Muhammad Rauf, Manager Operations Abdullah Nazir Bajwa, District Manager Operations Hafiz Tayyab, Manager IT Asad Elahi, Manager Finance Ahsan Nadeem, Transport Officer Arshad Saleem, and Manager Procurement Waqas Asghar were all named in the FIR. By May 21, ACE had arrested eleven of twelve named suspects. The contractor’s son-in-law was among those arrested. Investigators reportedly examined allegations linking the son of a former member of the National Assembly from Faisalabad to the case, with sources claiming he received monthly payments of Rs 300,000 from individuals associated with the programme, though no formal charges against him have been announced.
Fleet invoices applied the same method to machinery. Fuel logs recorded compactors, dumpers and lifting loaders consuming fuel and completing routes without matching GPS data or enough vehicles on the ground. The FIR says contractors billed expensive mini-dumpers while deploying cheaper loader rickshaws. An accounts office could miss that substitution on a spreadsheet. A resident waiting beside an uncollected mound could see it from the gate.
Digital records completed the fraud. The programme promised a GPS tag on every container, a tracked route for every vehicle, a location for every worker and an AI-generated score for every contractor. Investigators found inflated container counts, fabricated enclosure data and collection points recorded for facilities that had never been built. Officials and contractors used the monitoring platform to certify the fiction, and yet the government continues to present a dashboard that cannot clean a lane as the public’s assurance that the work happened.
Faisalabad is the largest case documented in an FIR, but Dera Ghazi Khan had been sending warnings for more than a year. In May 2025, the Express Tribune reported that a four-year sanitation contract worth Rs 84 billion across twelve tehsils and five districts had failed to supply essential machinery after five months. Waste was being dumped in open fields near Choti, Paighah, Chak Barmani, Chak Buzdar and Taunsa. Dawn reported in September 2025 that contractors were accused of mixing soil, stones and construction debris into garbage to increase the weight used for billing, while workers who had gone three months without salaries locked the machinery store. Those allegations preceded the arrests.
On August 22, 2026, the Express Tribune reported that ACE arrested Suthra Punjab Chief Finance Officer Muhammad Habib, Operations Manager Muhammad Hasnain and Rajanpur Tehsil Manager Umar Farooq over an alleged Rs 188.45 million loss in Dera Ghazi Khan. The report did not publish the underlying inquiry or explain the transactions behind that total. The arrest therefore establishes a second enforcement case, while the allegation and amount still require the evidentiary record ACE has not released.
Field checks in tehsils across southern and central Punjab, including Rojhan and Faisalabad, found enlisted sanitation workers who did not exist or did not report for duty while intermediaries and local officials collected their salaries. The same conditions travelled with the programme: hurried outsourcing, weak checks before payment, editable monitoring records and political pressure to fill executive dashboards before the province built the service underneath them. For residents, the district name changed while the bargain remained familiar: the government counted the worker, paid the contractor and left the waste.
Transparency International Pakistan sent a complaint to the Chief Minister’s office on December 2, 2025 concerning allegations of irregularities and non-compliance in Suthra Punjab. The organisation’s public register confirms the letter and date, but the available record does not establish that Punjab answered it, ordered an audit or published the contracts under challenge before the Faisalabad FIR arrived five months later.
Punjab outsourced collection across the province while waste management companies moved towards monitoring contractors rather than operating fleets themselves. The Urban Unit’s October 2025 asset mapping report described contractors still mobilising staff, machinery, temporary collection points and disposal sites during the early months of the programme. Political claims of province-wide delivery were therefore being made while the operational network was still under construction. The officials checking contract performance also controlled or relied upon the portal that the Faisalabad FIR says was manipulated.
Punjab’s PPRA rules depend on officials enforcing them before the payment leaves the treasury. Here, contract volume exceeded audit capacity, political deadlines displaced procurement checks, insiders could edit the monitoring platform, and violations brought an FIR months later instead of stopping payment. The contractor understood the gap between a rule printed in a tender and a rule enforced against an invoice. The public paid inside that gap.
Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif launched Suthra Punjab as a signature initiative: take formal waste collection into rural areas, create 200,000 jobs according to APP’s June 2026 report, secure favourable international coverage and build a record of visible administration. The programme website carries her endorsement and promises digitised delivery, protected sanitation workers and participation across every tehsil. A village that had never received municipal collection did not need the language of “co-creation.” It needed a worker with wages, a vehicle with fuel and a route that ended at a real disposal site.
The launch timetable outran the province’s ability to deliver. Internal reviews cited in earlier reporting found a shortfall of more than 40 per cent in the required machinery and workforce despite billions in expenditure. The government announced the programme before it built the verification system, awarded contracts before it could check deployment and released money before it could audit performance, and yet residents were expected to treat the launch ceremony as proof that a municipal service now existed. Corruption occupied the distance between the announcement and the street.
The programme has advertised its scale through numbers that change with the telling. One official account listed 131,654 sanitation workers and 1,865 management staff. The current public portal advertises more than 180,000 workers, 40,000 vehicles and service to 138 million residents, while APP’s June 2026 budget report said the programme served about 120 million people and had created more than 200,000 jobs. Those figures might describe different categories or dates, but Punjab publishes no reconciliation that lets a citizen distinguish a sanitation worker from the wider field force, a job from a worker, or a vehicle from a fleet asset. Faisalabad investigators found 633 ghost entries in one district, and no province-wide workforce verification has been published, so the record cannot support projecting that ratio across Punjab. The documented count is damaging enough: salaries passed through the system while actual workers handled the waste, the infection risk and the contempt attached to labour that officials were using as an invoice.
Ghost salaries and inflated invoices are old instruments of public theft. Suthra Punjab gave them a larger budget and a digital certificate. Forbes and the BBC covered the programme, officials presented it at COP30, and the Punjab government called it one of the world’s largest integrated waste management systems, and yet physical checks in Faisalabad found 600 of 2,317 recorded containers missing, only 33 of 118 billed waste enclosures working and 633 rostered workers absent from the workforce.
ACE has made arrests, registered cases and recovered assets, but Punjab has not announced a replacement for the procurement and monitoring system that enabled the fraud. Officials could edit the platform meant to monitor them. Dozens of regional companies and private subcontractors split the work across more sites than the existing audit machinery could check. The revenue model collected 1.4 per cent of its target, leaving the programme dependent on provincial allocations under IMF and federal fiscal pressure. The same household can therefore lose three times: through the budget, through the garbage charge and through the private payment required when public collection fails.
The Punjab government says it has provided Rs 270 billion to the programme. ACE alleges an estimated Rs 1 billion loss in Faisalabad and Rs 188.45 million in Dera Ghazi Khan, while investigations continue elsewhere. No evidence establishes the amount stolen across Punjab, and no published audit allows that number to be calculated. The existing cases have already established the public questions Punjab must answer: who could alter the portal, who approved each payment after physical verification, which contractor beneficial owners received the contracts, what penalties were imposed before the FIRs and how many real workers lost wages or medical cover while ghost names remained payable.
No one in the Chief Minister’s secretariat or ACE has explained who will verify the new verifier. The people who designed and operated the monitoring system now propose to preserve the programme, collect more charges and repair public confidence through the machinery that certified containers, routes and workers that investigators could not find. Can a resident contest a completed route when the street says one thing and the official portal says another? Punjab has provided no public mechanism for doing so.
Residents of Harbanspura, Nishtar Colony and Baghbanpura told the Express Tribune in June 2025 that the Suthra Punjab team had not arrived four months after the launch. By August 2026, the digital record showed the team as operational, and yet the garbage remained.