“The only answer to Pakistan’s problems,” he added, “is a broad-based people’s movement.”

The trash movement, which calls itself Responsible Citizens, does not yet qualify as broad, but it still drew a respectable crowd on a recent Sunday, considering the heat (above 90 degrees) and the time (around 4 p.m.). Mr. Ahmed and his friends were doling out trash bags they had bought for the occasion. About 40 people had gathered. Some were wearing masks. All were carrying shovels.

They set their sights low. The area of operation, Ghalib Market, was modest, a quiet traffic circle in central Lahore encircled by shops, a cricket field and a mosque.

It was not one of the dirtiest parts of the city, but the group felt attached to it, as they had cleaned it in the past, and wanted to see if their actions were having any effect.

The first time they cleaned there was like raking leaves on a windy autumn day.

“We collected, like, 30 bags, but there was no visible difference,” Mr. Ahmed said.

But they talked with local shopkeepers, in a kind of trash outreach, asking them to walk their garbage to the trash bin. Those connections, Mr. Ahmed said, were actually the point of the cleaning  setting an example for others to follow.

“The major problem people have here is that there are no bins,” said Murtaza Khwaja, a 21-year-old medical student.

Image Shoaib Ahmed, 21, one of the organizers of the group, in Lahore on a recent Sunday. Credit... Zackary Canepari for The New York Times

Actually, the problem was deeper. A long-term cycle of corrupt, weak governments interrupted by military coups has caused Pakistan’s political muscles to atrophy, leaving Pakistani society, particularly its poor, hopeless that it will ever receive the services  education, water, electricity, health  that it so desperately needs.