48
DEAR Chief Minister,
When Saad Rafique, the railways minister, recently asked your party to improve its disgraceful performance in Sindh before criticising his government, it must have stung.
I don’t like the city I call home to be held up as an example of terrible governance. Yet I am objective enough to accept that Karachi is the filthiest major city I have been to. The heaps of rubbish that line so many roads here are a reality that cannot be swept under the carpet.
I realise you have been recently appointed, and have inherited the problems that beset Sindh today. But the very fact that it took so long for the PPP to get rid of the incompetent Qaim Ali Shah speaks volumes for the low priority it accords good government.
Civic amenities in Karachi are stretched beyond breaking point.
If you think I am exaggerating, allow me to take you around Karachi to show you the dirt, the potholes and the misery that have become the hallmarks of the city. Or better still, let Arif Hasan, the city planner who wrote about some of these issues in these pages recently, be your guide.
Every time I go to Lahore, I am reminded how far Karachi has slipped behind in terms of cleanliness and civic organisation. And yet until the 1980s, my Lahori friends used to look up to Pakistan’s biggest city as a model to emulate. Now they look on Karachi with pity tinged with disgust.
It’s true that over the last three decades, Karachi has been victim to massive violence and unrest. The MQM and the PPP are both responsible for where the city is today. But rural Sindh has been woefully ignored as well. The police and the bureaucracy have been hamstrung by constant political interference.
The general perception in Sindh is that Punjab has made so much progress because it spends more money on development. The reality is quite different: Sindh’s development budget for 2016-17 is around Rs865 billion, while for Punjab, it’s about Rs550bn. In the smaller province this works out to Rs15,500 per head; for Punjab the figure is Rs544.
But to put this in perspective, the Express Tribune informed us that by the end of last April, or two months before the end of the fiscal year, Sindh had spent only 43 per cent of its allocation. So apart from blatant corruption on a vast scale, poor administration is a heavy cross the province has had to bear for decades.
Let me give you an example: a year or so ago, I met a young district commissioner who had served in Punjab and was now serving in a district of his home province. I asked him what was the major difference between his two postings. In Punjab, he said, district commissioners across the province would get a call on their office landlines from the chief minister’s private secretary every morning at 7.30 to make sure they were at work. In Sindh, on the other hand, nobody ever bothered him, so he didn’t get to work before 11.
There are so many examples of obvious corrupt practices that your predecessors have avoided addressing for reasons of their own. Take water: you probably have many friends living in Defence Society, Karachi’s most expensive area. Just ask how many of them get piped water.
This scandal has been with us for so long that we consider it normal. Obviously, nobody is dying of thirst, and the rich water their gardens and fill their swimming pools. So there’s no critical water shortage. And yet, it takes thousands of tankers to deliver it to homes.
No other major city has this problem because it is entirely self-made: various mafias run fleets of tankers, and city officials connive by selling them water out of the mains. The military, which prides itself on its lucrative housing estates, has been unable to sort this out, together with the city and provincial governments.
A couple of years ago, an English couple visiting Karachi briefly were amazed to see people travelling on the roofs of buses. They stopped the car several times to take pictures that they showed friends in Sri Lanka and England. Luckily, they did not photograph the piles of rubbish that adorn our street corners.
I know you can do very little about the sea of humanity from across Pakistan who head to Karachi to seek a better life. Slums grow on the periphery like giant mushrooms; closer in, the city is blighted by ugly, shoddily built high-rise apartment blocks. As a result of the city’s exploding population, all civic amenities that define urban living are stretched beyond breaking point.
But what excuse is there for the takeover of sidewalks by car dealers? Why should pedestrians have to walk on roads because showrooms display their cars wherever they please?
The solutions to many of our problems are beyond your powers to solve. But please sort out the ones you can.
Published in Dawn, November 12th, 2016
