August 18, 2005

Driving around in bustling Karachi had already become, in recent years, a close-to-hellish experience. However, in recent months, just about every major thoroughfare, especially those in the Clifton and Defence neighbourhoods, have been dug up. The situation has become especially bad for those who happen to live in these areas or those who commute to or pass through them, to and from work or school.

In most civilized countries of the world, which have some semblance of planning, the usual practice is that if roads have to be relaid and recarpeted, some kind of coordinated plan is followed, one which minimizes the inconvenience to the taxpayer (who foots the bill in the first place) and the motoring public.

This means that a system is followed by which not all the roads are dug up together, but in a piecemeal fashion. And when doing so, ample alternate routes — ideally, those that can handle the diverted traffic load — are readied before the digging work is begun and the planned diversions are publicized in the media, through newspapers, TV channels and via radio.

Clearly, those who do such things in this part of the world, namely the Karachi Port Trust (KPT) and its contracting firm, the Frontier Works Organization (FWO), do not really believe that the views or comfort of those who drive on the roads, and whose taxes pay for their budgets, need to be taken into consideration at all.

One is, of course, talking about the construction of the Clifton underpass, whose construction for the past many months has driven many a local resident to the point of insanity.

Initially, we were told that the project would be completed by the end of the year. But now its completion date has been extended to the middle of the next year -–– which means that there is no end in sight for the torture thousands of commuters, motorists and area residents have to endure every day. One restaurant, meanwhile, has managed to find some humour in all of this. Specializing in chicken, it has placed an advertisement on a billboard at the Do Talwar roundabout (at one end of Karachi’s famous Zamzama Boulevard) with the question: “Why did the chicken cross the road?” —- answer: “Because the underpass was being built”.

However, most of the people affected by the massive digging operation currently underway in this part of Karachi are not in the least bit amused. The construction of the bypass has shifted all the traffic load to the surrounding streets and service roads of Clifton.

The problem here is that most of the streets and service roads — in what many believe to be one of the Karachi’s most ‘posh’ areas (a misnomer if ever there was one) — are filled with craters and potholes that could easily gobble up a compact car like an Alto or a Mehran.

This means that traversing this lunar landscape, with the rush of cars and with most drivers driving in their typical ‘I-don’t-care-the-hell-about-the-other-car’ attitude, becomes a daily nightmare for those who wish to travel from this part of Clifton to Defence or anywhere past Defence.

So, when the underpass was being excavated, the KPT and the FWO, along with the then city district government, should have ensured that at least the side roads and lanes were in working order to partially accommodate some of the diverted traffic.

Then, there is the matter, as mentioned earlier, or working according to some kind of plan. In this case, it seems that there is no such thing. How else does one explain the digging up and re-carpeting of one section of the Mai Kolachi Expressway, followed (more recently) by the complete tearing up of one side of Khayaban-I-Jami, from Boating Basin to (what now remains of) Schon Circle.

The traffic has been diverted to the side road which has not (and this is no exaggeration) been carpeted for several years. Could not both of them have been done before the underpass work was to begin or after it had been completed? The result has been disastrous and leads to huge traffic jams every day, especially at rush hour in the mornings (the area has dozens of schools which adds to the office commuter traffic) and evenings.

A drive for someone who lives in Bath Island and wants to travel to, say, Seaview beach, now takes double or triple the normal time. Or someone returning from work on I. I. Chundrigar Road, and using the Mai Kolachi link to Clifton, will, any given evening, discover that a commute which previously took fifteen or twenty minutes now takes over an hour.

And since government agencies, especially those which deal with matters pertaining to the general public like construction of roads and their maintenance, provision of electricity, uplift and maintenance of parks, or the traffic police, do not really believe in either keeping the public informed or taking their views into consideration.

All that the hapless people of this part of Karachi can do now is to see precious time being wasted by the gross mismanagement that has become a feature of road-building in their city.

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