KARACHI: KARACHI: Water crisis: disturbances bring Lyari to standstill
By Our Staff Reporter
KARACHI, Nov 15: An even more intensified street protests returned to Lyari on Friday after a day of peace as Karachi Water and Sewerage Board miserably failed to fulfil its commitment to arrange tanker water for the town, worst-hit by the water crisis in the city persisting for the last few weeks.
Groups of angry youth marched through various localities of the town and enforced road blockades by putting up barricades. The agitation led to the closure of a number of roads and arteries — Lea Market, Haat Chowk, D. D. Chowdhary Road, Mir Mohammad Baloch Road, Sheedi Village etc. — immediately after Friday prayers. Raising slogans against the KWSB and the local government officials, the protesters were shouting: “we want water, not hollow pledges!”
Closure of several nerve routes led to a worst kind of traffic mess in the vast troubled area as well as the adjoining localities of Kharadar, Mithadar, Mauripur and Moosa Lane. The unscheduled street protest stranded thousands of commuters around the troubled areas of Lyari for many hours. Their bid to find a way out, resulted in clogged traffic in nearly all the narrow lanes and streets with quite a lot of vehicles constantly blowing horns in panic fearing attacks by the enraged crowds. Hundreds of them could not get through till sunset.
The protest and traffic jam blocked access to Lyari Town from Saddar (via Lea Market) and Kharadar (via Moosa
Lane).
As the protesters spread over a wider area in their attempt to block more roads, vehicular traffic on Mauripur Road and Nawab Mahabat Khanji Road remained suspended for several hours.
Activists leading the enraged groups of youth, told this reporter that their protest would continue till the normalization of water supply to Lyari.
Meanwhile, the residents of water-starved Baghdadi and Shah Beg Lane areas told Dawn that despite holding out solid assurances on water supply through tankers by Thursday, not a single tanker out of the 50 pledged by the KWSB had so far entered in any of the affected areas.
“All the relevant authorities have been taking no serious notice of the public furore, but they will come to know that the ongoing protest will succeed in forcing them to change their indifferent attitude,” warned an activist in an aggressive mood.
“The campaign is bound to intensify further, possibly with violent agitation, if the authorities did not meet the deprived and frustrated people’s just demand,” another ambitious activist uttered loudly.
A senior citizen among the protesters supported his views and condemned the KWSB’s apathy towards the pressing problem. “For the last four days, hundreds of people have been staging sit-in, demonstrations and rallies for the an essential quantity of water enough for their survival but the authorities have constantly been turning a blind eye and the calls from the suffering people are falling on deaf ears,” he wondered. “Stopping water supply tantamount to usurpation of right to live,” his companion groaned.
A group of protesters strongly criticized the elected representatives for not even bothering to visit the protesters to pacify the enraged citizens.
PASBAN: The officer-bearers of Pasban, Lyari, have expressed their skepticism over the effectiveness of the KWSB’s interim arrangement for water supply to Lyari, adds PPI.
In a statement issued here on Friday, the local leaders of Pasban, Ajmal Mama, Sohail Khan, Kamal, Nasir and others said that they met Nazim of Lyari Abdul Khaliq Jumma and superintendent engineer of the KWSB Abdul Rahim Bhatti on Thursday and conveyed them that the arrangement of water tankers for the affected areas was not a permanent solution to the chronic problem.
They said that they told the officials to restore the normal supply through taps immediately.
