| 20 April 2004 | Tuesday | 29 Safar 1425 |
The transport fiasco
THQ hospital neglected
Waiting for Vanunu
No 'quick fix' solution to transport problems
Any Israeli who bought the February 16 edition of the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth would have believed that a truly wicked man was about to be released from Ashkelon prison. Each time a suicide bomber blew himself up, the prisoner would celebrate.
Worse still, said the paper, the inmate - once a keeper of Israel's nuclear secrets - wants to endanger his country further after his release. "He told me," a former prisoner was quoted as saying, "that he has additional material and that he will reveal secrets..."
Should it be a surprise, then, that the very same prisoner, supposedly celebrating the slaughter of innocents while preparing to betray his country yet again, holds a clutch of awards from European peace groups, the Sean McBride Peace prize and an honorary doctorate from the University of Tromso?
In 2000, the Church of Humanism told him: "You are honest, courageous and morally highly motivated, and may the great sacrifice you have made serve to protect not only those living in Israel but all the peoples of the Middle East and perhaps the world." The same man has also been put forward as a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Mordechai Vanunu, it seems, can only be loved or loathed. Indifference to the former Israeli nuclear technician is impossible. For he is the man who, in 1986, took evidence to The Sunday Times of the full story behind Israel's secret nuclear weapons plant at Dimona in the Negev desert, complete with the total number of advanced fission bombs there - 200 at the time - and, even more disturbingly, complete with pictures.
He said that Israel had mastered a thermonuclear design and appeared to have a number of thermonuclear bombs ready for use. He was subsequently lured by a girl from London to Rome and then kidnapped, drugged and freighted back to Israel by Israeli secret policemen.
But, after 18 years of imprisonment - 12 of them in solitary confinement - the world's most famous whistleblower is scheduled for release. Israel - not to mention the world - is holding its breath.
Will he divulge further secrets of Dimona - always supposing he has any after 18 years of incarceration - or curse the country of which he is a citizen, albeit a citizen who converted to Christianity before his arrest and who wants to emigrate to the United States? Will he emerge a cowed man, anxious only to apologize for the terrible betrayal he inflicted upon his country? Or will he, as his friends and supporters and his adopted American parents hope, become an apostle of peace, one of the greatest of this generation's prisoners of conscience, the man who tried to rid the world of the threat of nuclear annihilation?
The Israeli government is still uncertain how to confront Vanunu's release scheduled for tomorrow, April 21. They are known to be considering - perhaps have already decided upon - "certain supervisory means" and "appropriate measures" to shut Vanunu up.
In the second half of January, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon met with Menachem Mazuz, Israel's attorney general, and the defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, and discussed whether Vanunu should be refused a passport. Vanunu would be free to sunbathe on the beaches of Tel Aviv but could not tour the world advertising Israel's nuclear power.
It's a sign of how fearful the Israeli administration has become at the prospect of this one man's release that Sharon also summoned to this conference Yehiel Horev's so-called "Defence Ministry Security Unit", the country's internal and external intelligence services - Shin Beth and the equally overestimated Mossad - and a representative of the Israeli Atomic Energy Committee.
Horev, it is now known, wanted to go much further than Sharon. He proposed clapping an administrative detention order on Vanunu - Israel's usual way of dealing with Palestinians whom they regard as "terrorists" - although the meeting apparently came to the conclusion that this would only enhance Vanunu's reputation as a martyr for world peace.
There's another way of shutting Vanunu up, of course. He can be publicly freed and then - the moment he starts talking about his work as a nuclear technician - he can be tried again and thrown back into Ashkelon jail - or Shikma prison, as the Israelis call it now.
But the real problem that Vanunu represents is that he will remind the world at a critically important moment in the history of the Middle East that Israel is a nuclear power and that its warheads stand ready to be fired from the Negev desert.
He will also remind the world that the Americans, despite battering their way into Iraq to destroy Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, continue to give their political, moral and economic support to a country that has secretly amassed a treasure trove of weapons of mass destruction.
How can President Bush remain silent on Israel's nuclear power when he has not only illegally invaded an Arab state for allegedly harbouring nuclear weapons and condemned Iran for the same ambitions, but also praised - along with Tony Blair's government - Colonel Qadhafi of Libya for abandoning his nuclear pretensions? If the Arab states are being "defanged" - always supposing they had any real fangs in the first place - why should Israel not be "de-nuclearized"? Why can't the United States apply the same standards to Israel as it does to the Arabs? Or why, for that matter, can't Israel apply the same standards to itself that it demands of its Arab enemies?
This is the debate that the Israeli and the American governments wish to stifle. In the United States, where any discussion of the Israeli-American relationship that deviates from the benign is routinely condemned as subversive or "anti-Semitic", discussion of Israel's nuclear power is not something that Washington will want to hear on the Sunday talk shows.
Vanunu, it should be said at once, is well aware of all this, of his own importance - infinitely greater than it was when he was a mere junior technician at Dimona - and of the role that tens of thousands of anti-nuclear campaigners expect him to play in the world.
Many times, through friends and through his own brothers, Vanunu has said that he has no new nuclear secrets but has the right to oppose nuclear weapons in Israel or anywhere else. "All I want to do is to go to America, get married and start a new life," he says.
No one can doubt Vanunu's conviction. Born in 1954 to a religious Jewish family in Morocco, he immigrated to Israel at the age of nine, performed his military service in the mid-seventies and began work at Dimona in November 1976 while completing a graduate course in philosophy and geography. Perhaps it was during his travels in Thailand, Burma, Nepal and Australia in early 1986 that he decided he had a moral duty to talk about Israel's nuclear weapons.
In the same year, he was baptized at an Anglican church in Sydney. Vanunu had clearly become deeply distressed at Israel's growing nuclear power when he walked into British newspaper offices in September of 1986 in the hope of telling the world the truth about Dimona.
He had dropped by Robert Maxwell's Daily Mirror at first, handed over his photographs of the nuclear plant and waited for a reply. Unknown to Vanunu, Maxwell sent the pictures round to the Israeli embassy in London to "take a look at them", supposedly to "confirm" whether or not the story was true.
It seems likely that Maxwell had motives other than journalistic integrity in this betrayal of Vanunu. After his death at sea in 1991, Maxwell, who had stolen millions in pensioners' funds, was given a state funeral in Israel at which Shimon Peres praised his "services" to the state.
Maxwell's Daily Mirror ran a "spoiler" story on September 28, belittling Vanunu and carrying the headline "The Strange Case of Israel and the Nuclear Con Man." The Sunday Times ran with the full story - but Vanunu had already disappeared. Entrapped by a female Mossad agent, he had been lured on to a British Airways flight to Rome and promptly kidnapped. It seems, in fact, that he was seized inside Rome's Fiumicino Airport.
Unable to speak to journalists, he carefully wrote out details of his movements on the palm of his hand and pressed it to the window of his prison truck as it took him to court. "Rome ITL 30:9:86 2100 came to Rome by BA504," he had written. He had been kidnapped at 9pm on September 30 at Rome International. Were the Italian authorities involved in his kidnap? Were they present when he was seized? Perhaps Vanunu can tell us.
He is certainly a man of endurance. Once, during his 12 years of solitary, the prison authorities accidentally freed him for exercise before Arab prisoners in the jail-yard had been returned to their cells. Vanunu immediately walked towards them.
One of the Arabs, a Lebanese imprisoned for smuggling arms into the West Bank, was among the first strangers to bring word of Vanunu's appearance to the outside world. "Vanunu fell into step with us and smiled at us and it was a time before we realized who he was," the freed Lebanese later told The Independent.
"He said it was good to be with us and we thought he was a brave man. Then the guards realized their mistake and we were pushed and shoved away from him, back to our cells."
An Israeli journalist visiting another prisoner was amazed to see Vanunu. "For a short moment I saw a bucolic scene," he wrote, "as if taken from some other reality: a serene man, sitting on a bench in a garden and reading Nietzsche in English. I approached him and extended my hand. 'Pleased to meet you, my name is Ronen,' I said. 'I'm Motti,' the most confined prisoner in the state of Israel replied. Before we could continue to talk, screaming wardens rushed over and grabbed him away."
A former prisoner, Yossi Harush, has provided another glimpse of the imprisoned Vanunu in the years after his solitary confinement ended. "During the day," Harush told Yedioth Ahronoth, "during walks, he meets people and talks with them. I spoke a lot with Vanunu.
We were friends. He would come to my cell... He has good conditions. He is treated nicely in prison... He has no restrictions on leaving his cell, but he is restricted within the prison. I myself, as a working prisoner, painted a red line that he is forbidden to cross. I was ordered to do that, and afterwards our relationship cooled off."
Vanunu has been regularly visited by an Anglican clergyman, Dean Michael Sellors. It was Sellors who pointed out to him that his release date coincided with the Queen's birthday. "He said that in that case, he'd better get a ticket and greet her himself."
Vanunu has also taken heart in the actions of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, a normally conservative organization, which has stated that, "any sanctions against Mordechai after release would be illegal and immoral." A chatline on the Hebrew website of the Israeli daily Maariv shows that a number of young Israelis regard Vanunu as a hero rather than a threat.
Mary Eoloff, a retired American schoolteacher who, with her husband, adopted Vanunu in the hope that he could be given US citizenship and released, was the first to reveal that when Israeli security men offered to release him a year before the expiry of his 18 years in jail, Vanunu turned them down. "He believes in freedom of speech," she said.
It remains to be seen if Israel will allow Vanunu the free speech he loves. Horev, the defence ministry security official who attended Sharon's meeting, has spoken of the threat that he believes the nuclear technician represents, which seems to be about ambiguity rather than state secrets.
Horev compares this ambiguity to water in a glass. "My job is to ensure that the water doesn't spill over the glass," he said recently. "Up until the Vanunu affair, the water was at a very low level. The affair caused the water level to rise significantly and caused Israel great damage, but the water still didn't overflow. If we let certain people act in the matter, the water will spill."
The Israeli journalist Raanan Shaked was a good deal more cynical when he spoke on the subject on Israel's Channel 10 TV. "Who is the main threat to Israel?" he asked. "Of course, Mordechai Vanunu! He is the big danger. Israeli democracy simply cannot withstand the impact of this one man saying what every child knows: we have nuclear weapons."
On April 21, when Vanunu is released, we shall find out if the water is going to overflow - and whether Vanunu will cross the red line painted so ominously on the floor at the instruction of the authorities.
The transport fiasco
The transport crisis in the twin cities which surfaced last Monday is a classic example of mismanagement by the concerned authorities. Mishandling of a longstanding dispute between a single big private bus company and a conglomerate of many small private transport operators resulted in chaos on the roads last week as hundreds of commuters were left stranded at bus stops under the sweltering weather.
The problem actually began several years ago when the provincial authorities concluded a franchise agreement with the bus company based in Rawalpindi, giving it the monopoly to run on certain (apparently more lucrative) routes within the twin cities. This was to be implemented in phases.
The agreement, however, threatened to push some of the wagon/Suzuki van/small bus operators out of business. As was to be expected, the latter protested against the implementation of the franchise agreement, occasionally staging strikes.
Delay in implementation of the agreement in full by the Regional Transport Authority (RTA) led to accusations by the private bus company that the former was reneging on the agreement. Meanwhile, the authorities complicated matters further by allowing the bus company to ply on some other routes which were not included in the agreement, apparently to compensate for delay in implementing the latter.
This whole bubble burst last Monday when the authorities suddenly decided to implement the franchise agreement and also told the bus company to stop plying on the routes not included in the original agreement. The small transport operators meanwhile seized the golden opportunity to assert their rights by taking their vehicles off some of the unfranchised routes as well.
Between the transport authorities, the small transport operators and the bus company, the poor commuters were thus left high and dry at the bus stands. As if the commuters were not already having enough troubles, the police, for reasons better known to the authorities, were reported to be trying to stop taxis from picking up passengers stranded at bus stops in Rawalpindi.
It looks like the provincial authorities had committed itself to the franchise agreement with the bus company without doing proper homework. It was obvious that the agreement would threaten the interests of small transport operators and their staff, and thus, that they would rise up and fight for their rights. Did the authorities chalk out any plans to deal with this?
Apparently not, for if the authorities had been sincere in achieving the objective of providing the public with a modern and affordable public transport service, it should have struck a concomitant agreement with the small transport operators to phase out their operations on the franchised routes.
This would have had to entail rehabilitative measures to help the affected small transport operators move into other existing or new routes, or alternatively move into other areas of employment or business, in order to forestall any disruptive resistance to the operations of the new bus company.
Implementing the franchise agreement with the bus company without taking the above measures well beforehand is a reflection of lack of foresightedness on the part of the authorities.
It was five days into the transport crisis before the regional transport authorities eventually announced on Friday that new routes had been offered to the small transporters displaced by the franchise agreement but that they were not happy with it. It was also reported that the Islamabad Transport Authority had started several new routes within the Capital on Friday.
The real objective of any transport authority should be the provision of a modern, efficient and affordable public transport service to the public. This objective was no where in sight during last week's melee on the roads.
In fact, reports in the press indicate that the transport authorities were complicating the mess and adding to the confusion by apparently issuing whimsical orders regarding certain routes and fixing inflated fares which the bus company rejected as being too high.
The transport authorities, for reasons which are unlikely to be wholly humanitarian, appear to be on the side of the hundreds of small transport operators. The latter in turn have taken advantage of public sympathy for the poor and disadvantaged in their tussle for routes with the big rich bus company.
But the small transport operators are far from being the solution to the growing transport needs and demands of modern cities. Their lack of uniformity, coordination and professionalism have contributed to a public transport service in the twin cities that is short on punctuality, reliability, comfort and safety.
A frustrated commuter who was caught up in the transport crisis last week suggested that all the small transport operators should pool their resources together to form a big transport company and be shareholders in it.
This company should be fashioned on the lines of any modern bus service but with a big difference: it would be a people's transport company for the people. Such a company should complement the service already being provided to commuters by the existing Rawalpindi-based bus company.
But this is a revolutionary idea which requires a transport authority with revolutionary zeal to manage and carry it through. For the time being, the commuters are thankful if the authorities settle amicably the disruptive tussle for routes amongst all concerned, and bring the assortment of wagons/vans/small buses back out on the roads.
THQ hospital neglected
Tehsil headquarters hospital, Hasilpur, is facing numerous problems. It is without basic and modern facilities. It is the only hospital for a population of over 100,000 in the area.
Due to the shortage of specialists, medicines and surgical instruments, the number of patients has considerably decreased while the private hospitals in the town are unable to cope with the growing number of patients. The emergency patients are dispatched to Bahawalpur's Victoria Hospital, but many of them die on the way. During emergencies, the shortage of oxygen gas cylinders causes deaths.
The boundary wall of THQ hospital has also collapsed but the Buildings Department has not allocated funds for its construction. An agonizing factor is that even the district government, Bahawalpur and tehsil administration, Hasilpur, have also not allocated funds for the provision of medical facilities.
The people have demanded of the Punjab chief minister to provide funds for the upgradation of THQ hospital and take measures to equip the hospital with modern instruments and an operation theatre, in addition to funds for the purchase of medicines for the deserving and poor and order posting of specialist doctors in the hospital.
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According to a report, the federal government is considering to construct Multan-Gowadar-Karachi motorway through Bahawalpur-Rahimyar Khan instead of its earlier approved plan along the right bank of the Indus. A decision seems to be on the anvil as the Communication Ministry is seized of this issue.
Bahawalpur and Rahimyar Khan districts are treated as under-developed areas of the country. The local population feels the impact of past deprivation. However, these neglected areas are vital in respect of commerce, trade, industry, agriculture, particularly wheat and cotton, as well as from the defence point of view. The attention of the government will help end the backwardness of Bahawalpur and other parts of the former division and open new avenues of employment and progress.
The government claims to bring the under-developed areas at par with the developed ones and undertake uplift projects for their betterment. It should therefore finalize this proposed route for the new motorway.
The passing of motorway through Bahawalpur and Rahimyar Khan will help bring progress and prosperity to this area. The surrounding areas also will be facilitated in respect of speedier means of communication and Bahawalpur, which could not be industrialized in the past, could attract foreign investors for the establishment of industries.
Industrialization will help eliminate unemployment, and the government will earn revenue in the shape of taxes from the new industrial units and other projects set up by the private sector here.
Drawing the attention of the federal minister for communications to the need for constructing a motorway through Bahawalpur and Rahimyar Khan, Bahawalpur Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BCCI) president Sheikh Abbas Raza has supported this proposal.
In his letter to the minister, he said that the law and order situation in this area was comparatively better and Bahawalpur's role in the country's economy was an important one. In addition, it was a cotton and wheat growing area and if the proposed motorway passed through this route, it would help promote trade, industry and exports from here. Moreover, it would also help promote tourism in the desert areas of Cholistan.
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Bahawalpur Arts Council (BAC) organized a mehfil-e-mushaira in connection with the celebrations of jashn-i-rohi here. It was participated by a number of noted poets. Former parliamentarian Syed Tabish Alwari and Prof Sohail Akhtar were the chief guests while DCO Imran Ahmed presided. The poets, including Ms Parveen Ghauri and Shugufta Altaf, recited their poems.
BAR Resident Director Zubair Rabbani promised to hold such programmes in future.
Waiting for Vanunu
That Pakistan became a nuclear power without compromising on the quality of its cuisine must indeed be a matter of great relief, especially for its own people. Imagine the irony of millions of Pakistanis routinely eating grass as the late Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had envisioned - and celebrating the bomb too.
"If India builds the bomb," he is reported to have said in 1965, "we will eat grass, or leaves, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own." As for India, a large number has been haplessly following the late Bhutto's recipe, a condition that has little to do with their nation's nuclear obsession.
In the chronically impoverished Bolangir and Kalahandi districts of Orissa, there are thousands who actually have to dig out unsafe roots for a meal in this shining country.
Equally unnerving is the widespread popularity that both sides claim for their dangerous project. In one country the maker of the bomb is lionized and forgiven his dangerous trespasses even when he pawns away his country's nuclear secrets to dubious agents of suspect countries. On this side of the border, a missile-builder is made president, the revered head of state, nothing less.
What is it about nuclear weapons that brings about virtual collusion between the major political lobbies in India and Pakistan? The other day, in a ghastly show of one-upmanship, India's opposition Congress Party was locked in an acrimonious debate with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party about who should be given more credit for acquiring nuclear weapons for the country.
There is hardly any political group in parliament that opposes nuclear weapons or regards the nuclear policy as a psychopathic philosophy that is lethal to the future of mankind. This is the unfortunate reality in both India and Pakistan. The few peace activists that exist are regarded contemptuously as namby-pamby pacifists in a macho milieu.
In such a moment of all enveloping bleakness, Mordechai Vanunu, Israel's nuclear-whistle blower, shines like a beacon of hope. He is the hero and the Nobel peace prize nominee of the anti-bomb lobbies the world over.
On Wednesday, April 21, Vanunu will complete his assigned 18 years in an Israeli prison. Yet he may not walk free this week as the Zionist government of Ariel Sharon hatches fresh conspiracies to prolong his immoral incarceration.
For the record, Vanunu was a low-profile nuclear technician at Israel's secretive Dimona nuclear facility, before his revelations in 1986 to The Times of London came as a sensational expose of Israel's clandestine nuclear programme. In the tell-all interview about Dimona, Vanunu provided photographs taken quietly inside the plant in the final months of his employment. The revelations destroyed Israel's credibility on its nuclear stance.
The government first sought to discredit him, then lured Vanunu from London to Rome in a Mossad honey trap. From there he was flown secretly to Tel Aviv for trial. Several times in recent years, Israel has denied his request for parole.
Reluctant to discuss the possibility of his release after the 18-year sentence that ends this week, Israel's Justice Ministry has little to add to its terse statement, which says: "Various issues are being weighed in advance of Mordechai Vanunu's scheduled release. Beyond that, we cannot go into detail."
A Newsweek report in January this year said that Vanunu was actually given the offer of an early release some time last year but with stiff conditions attached. The Israeli security official who met him in his prison cell in the southern Israeli town of Ashkelon with the reported deal returned empty-handed. Vanunu would have had to sign a pledge to never again talk publicly about Israeli nukes or about Dimona, where Israel is said to have built some 200 atomic bombs.
There are reports that the hawks in Israel's defence department want to invoke an arcane law to prolong his stay in prison. Other Israeli officials are in favour of extending the imprisonment "administrative detention" - a measure usually reserved for Palestinians suspected of what Israel regards as terrorism.
In spite of his confinement in abominable prison conditions, Vanunu reportedly turned down the offer because he believed in freedom of speech. "He said he won't do it," said Mary Eoloff.
According to the Newsweek report, the retired American schoolteacher, along with her husband, legally adopted Vanunu a few years ago, in a failed attempt to win him US citizenship. "He believes in freedom of speech," Ms. Eoloff was quoted as saying.
In his absence, Vanunu's exploits have become a major peace icon and his name featured at countless discussions at Mumbai's World Social Forum meeting in January this year. If Vanunu is able to travel and speak freely, he will become a powerful force for the dismantling of Israel's nuclear weapons. The step will almost certainly have an impact on India and Pakistan, possibly on the Big Five themselves.
At a time when Israel's biggest threats, namely, Iraq, Libya and possibly Syria are in the process of being de-fanged as it were, it is even likely that the cushion of support that Israel derives from Washington's blind indulgence could begin to crumble. This is what Mordechai Vanunu could do as a free man.
But suppose he were an Indian or a Pakistani instead of being an Israeli? Suppose one of our own had become the whistle blower? Would he still be alive? Or would we lynch him?
(Readers who wish to join the campaign to free Vanunu from Sharon's prison might wish to sign the petition by visiting the web site http://www.ipetitions.com/campaigns/freemordechaivanunu/).
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It is election time in India, in other words time also for bizarre stories to surface. Like the one about Sultana Begum, the alleged widow of Mirza Mohammed Bedar Bakht, great grandson of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor. It seems the lady went to the Sikh holy city of Amritsar on Tuesday, to "apologize" for the 17th century execution of Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Sikh Guru, by Emperor Aurangzeb.
There were some tell-tale clues about the story. "I belong to a royal lineage. Look at my pathetic condition, living in poverty. I only have a tea-stall in Howrah," she told a reporter.
"Since I am a descendant of the Mughal family, the government should give me two bighas of land and Rs 50,000 monthly pension," she demanded. The mother of five daughters and a son, who works as a cook in Saudi Arabia, Sultana Begum has been in the news off and on.
No 'quick fix' solution to transport problems
Karachi's City government has pledged to issue permits to induct 273 new buses in the public transport network. This should presumably be a welcome decision for transporters and commuters alike, although what the addition will do to commuting time with the roads already packed to capacity with vehicles in another matter. The decision will be implemented by September this year.
It is true that the existing public transport in Karachi is insufficient for the growing population, but it has more to do with mismanagement rather than anything else. The mafia that controls this form of transport have the means as well as the power to streamline the system and to spruce up their fleet, but for them such concerns are neither financially viable nor humanely essential. So why bother?
The Green bus scheme was launched well over a year ago and initially the buses were running pretty smoothly, with all passengers seated neatly in a cool interior and no ugly emissions trailing behind the vehicle. But this picture too was not long lasting as now one frequently sees travellers leaning straight against the doors, and a black trail too is visible, proving that no maintenance work has been carried out on these vehicles after they were put on the roads.
As for the routes which all the public buses take, there are really no words to describe the scene which all Karachiites are anyway familiar with. From Empress Market to Teen Hatti to the Nursery signal to the Abdullah Shah Ghazi bus adda - the routes are a free-for-all territory for the transport operators, with no one keeping to the bus lanes (not that there are such specified lanes everywhere).
And in between, these bulky carriers also edge into any nook and cranny they want in little bylanes and even in residential blocks. It is more than apparent that absolutely no rule of law is in force or official able to control the manoeuvres of these giants who come hustling from behind, blowing then deafening horns and pushing any car that has the temerity to stand its ground almost on to the pavement.
When the city government's transport and communication department reviewed the Urban Transport Scheme (UTS), did they bother to include the opinion of daily commuters in their meetings or surveys? All that was said was that three new companies would enter into an agreement with the city government and another seven were scheduled to finalize agreements within a couple of months to get the 273 new airconditioned buses on the road. Obviously, a lot of finances are going to change hands somewhere.
The EDO (Transport) stated that new routes would be allotted to these companies in order to ensure better travel facilities. New routes? Is the official referring to the flyover networks under construction for over two years in different parts of the city where construction work is wrecking traffic and the daily lives of every traveller? The Korangi flyover keeps getting closed sporadically for construction work, giving travellers in the area a nightmarish surprise in the morning every now and then. On the Main FTC-Sharae Faisal traffic signal too, the situation is as messy it can get - and all hours are now peak traffic jam hours.
Lily Bridge which meets the Club Road signal at one end is impossible to cross now at any time. With the Sheraton and Karachi Club entrances opening on to that road, the situation if viewed from the top is such that big cars, little cars, rickshaws and buses appear to be stuffed into a matchbox one on top of the other. These are but a few examples. And the only immediate solution that the city government can think of is 273 new buses with some miracle routes and hi-tech operating standards!
All this clearly proves that there are no 'quick fix' solutions for Karachi's travel and traffic problems. If the city government is planning to earn some accolades for showing concern for Karachi's lower-income groups, they really have to go back to the drawing board and remedy the existing ills.
And while remedying these - like building new road and reconstructing the present ones - if they can at the same time provide easy alternate routes, then they may establish that they truly have the people's concern at heart. New buses on their on their own will mean little.