DOWN a dusty side road in the province of Punjab stands Shehr-e-Khamoshan, a new graveyard with freezers imported from Germany and a network of 22 video cameras that will allow relatives of the deceased to live-stream footage of funerals at the $1.5m facility. Attend a ceremony in person and there is little risk of heatstroke: dozens of fans hang from the ceiling of an arched prayer zone that is almost entirely open to the air.

The state-owned “model graveyard”, with its wide footpaths and neatly trimmed lawns, will serve the 11m-strong population of Lahore, the capital of Pakistan’s richest and most populous province. Three more are under construction in the region. Across Pakistan burial grounds have struggled to cope with an urban population that has risen from 28% of the total in 1981 to 41% now (unsurprisingly land is scarce in cities). Burials have been banned in the overflowing public graveyards of the largest city, Karachi. There have been reports of policemen hiding in coffins to catch gravediggers who are overcharging for burial plots.

Lahore’s new “silent city”, as it is known, aims to lighten the burden on grieving families. The project’s director has urged other provinces to replicate his good work. But even with its swanky golf-carts for the elderly and mechanical diggers it may be less effective than it claims. When the government of Punjab bought the land, it planned to build a cemetery about 20 times the size. The facility that opened last month has space for only 8,000 graves.

Some people fret that the new cemetery will further squeeze out space for corpses by giving relatives of the dead long-term rights to their loved ones’ plots. Historically Muslim burial grounds have managed to keep on welcoming new souls by recycling grave sites. Gravediggers in Miani Sahib, an old cemetery in the centre of Lahore which has room for around 300,000 graves, routinely bury people in plots that go unvisited. Today, as more Pakistanis invest in headstones and concrete shrines to protect remains, gravediggers in desperation sometimes seek out old-style earthen mounds, and a few place remains on top of bodies that were laid out just a few months earlier.

Besides failing to address the lack of space for the dead, the new facility could spark a trend for VIP burial that makes death as unequal as life, says Zaigham Khan, a columnist for The News, a newspaper. The government claims that anyone who cannot afford the $200 fee will be granted a free space. But standing in an ancient burial ground that abuts Shehr-e-Khamoshan, a village elder offers a different view. He reckons the plush cemetery is part of an attempt to lure government workers to a new housing project nearby, which Lahori officials hope will help to deal with the overcrowding of live bodies in the fast-expanding city.