KARACHI, Jan 3: No significant development work was carried out during 2004 in Lyari Town due to paucity of funds.
Admitting the fact, sources in the town administration maintained that they had repeatedly approached the city government, as well as provincial authorities, in this regard but could not receive proper response.
Faced with a severe financial crisis, the town could not even perform its normal functions with regard to civic services, which include lifting of garbage, maintenance of main/link roads and installation of streetlights.
Lyari residents and community leaders attribute the lapse to a lack of coordination between the town administration and city government. They say that although the CDGK had undertaken a few road-building schemes, progress on the work is slow due to the lack of coordination and proper planning.
They point out that in the absence of proper planning by civic agencies, problems in this oldest locality of Karachi continued to aggravate and no serious initiative had been taken to resolve them.
For years together, the entire town has remained a victim of neglect due to by the concerned authorities and development agencies, some of the community leaders deplored, and told this reporter that almost all other areas of the city had been developed in '50s-'60s after proper planning.
It is only Lyari which has been left with an infrastructure that has also become absolutely inadequate owing to rapid and uncontrolled increase in its population. The unprecedented population growth over the past few decades has crowded the existing plots (normally measuring 40-60 square yards each) meant for one family.
The resultant proliferation of multi-storey buildings (with as little as five to six feet distance between them), along with a parallel increase in commercial activity in Lyari, has been causing a chronic congestion in the whole of Lyari.
A social worker, criticizing mismanagement and ill-planning on the part of the civic agencies, said: "The fault is partly ours. We are sentimental about our land and family system.
Instead of acquiring a vacant place to live comfortably, we simply resort to building additional floors one after the other only to add to the congestion. Thus, a small piece of land with its attached civic facilities, hardly sufficient for one family, comes under the use of many families.''
Owing to the ever increasing population, essential civic facilities, mainly water supply and sewage disposal, are under immense pressure. Instead of modifying the system by increasing capacity, the population has been made to be content with the worn out water and sewerage lines laid in the middle of the 19th century, according to the social worker.
A senior community leader said: "Not only this, sheer negligence on the part of civic agencies is always there and no efforts to ameliorate the prevalent conditions have ever been made.''
He alleged that huge amounts of money meant for development work in Lyari had always been misappropriated by officials of the civic agencies. Another community leader added: "The government knows very well where this money goes.
People from top to bottom - engineers, contractors and executives - all take their share." He deplored that a social mechanism for accountability of such people never existed.
