As the election campaign stutters along its no-frills, no- thrills path, the parties and politicians that have survived the arbitrary and often illogical screening process are going through the motions of asking people to vote for them.

The people justifiably want to know what politicians have done for them in the past and what they propose to do in the future. Nothing very much, is the honest answer to both questions. Nowhere is this more evident than in the backwaters of Karachi: a visit to Orangi and places like the Buffer Zone and Federal B Area show yet again how hard life is for the vast majority of our citizens.

And yet, the good news is that in the face of terrible adversity and criminal neglect by the state, the people condemned to live in these disadvantaged areas are resilient and hardworking, and more often than not develop their own solutions rather than wait for lethargic and corrupt government agencies to intervene.

The Orangi Pilot Project, of course, is a path-breaking initiative that is now widely replicated in Pakistan and abroad. It has transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of poor people by empowering them and showing them how to take charge and change their environment.

There is a dynamism at work in these localities that is in sharp contrast with the complacency and stagnation that has become a hallmark of our so-called posh housing societies. For instance, the literacy rate in Orangi, a low-income area of 1.2 million souls, is a startling 83 per cent. And this has not been achieved by the government's education department; rather, rudimentary, make-shift schools were first run in small homes and under canvas.

Now, there are signs for private schools in just about every lane. One businesswoman has contributed five million rupees for a pucca school that is now functioning, teaching boys and girls from class one to class eight. Incidentally, I was told that after 9/11, fewer parents now enrol their children in madrassasahs, preferring to send them to normal schools.

Contrary to stereotypes, the most forward-looking community in Orangi are the Pakhtoons. They work hard, help each other get a start and the second generation of settlers want to marry educated girls. I met two young Pathans who are involved in running schools, including six home-based girls schools supported by the Trust for Voluntary Organizations. Orangi is home to literally thousands of cottage industries that make a wide range of products from Benarsi silk saris to spare parts for cars. Many of these entrepreneurs started off with small loans they received from the micro-credit branch of the OPP.

In the Buffer Zone (our bureaucratic approach to naming localities never ceases to amaze me), there are literally hundreds of small weaving and garment factories working round the clock. In one such operation, I sat on the floor with a hundred or so workers, listening to my old friend Javed Jabbar make his campaign pitch. In his short address, he managed to bring in the population problem, his audience's civic problems and the threat posed by the WTO agreement to their jobs. How he does against the MQM juggernaut in this election race is another matter; in any case, I wish him luck.

The well-to-do of Pakistan do not realize how deep and wide the gulf between them and the have-nots has become. Arif Hasan, the perceptive and indefatigable observer of social and physical changes taking place in Pakistan, laments in his book, 'The Unplanned Revolution':

"The rich now live in ghettos, surrounded by armed guards and security systems. They are developing their entertainment, recreational, educational and commercial facilities in their own areas. Old Karachi food, book and other retail outlets have relocated to these posh neighbourhoods, and boutiques selling first world designer goods and international chains selling fast food have sprung up.

"Their children do not visit the National Museum or the Karachi Zoo and are more at home at London's Hyde Park than at Safari Park in Gulshan-i-Iqbal. Their textbooks, too, teach them nothing about their city, its history, its problems or its culture. The sprawling lower-middle-class settlements of District Central, the katchi abadis of District West, or the chaos of the inner city simply do not exist for them. Thus Karachi has lost what is perhaps a city's greatest asset - an interested, informed and enlightened elite - and in the absence of such an elite, a decline in civic services and institutions is bound to happen."

According to General Musharraf and his acolytes, these problems are supposed to be solved by the devolution of power initiated by this government. To check the situation on the ground, I met one nazim of the union council in Orangi. Outside his office, the road was under construction, and I thought he had begun some development work, even if it was on his doorsteps. The reality was very different as this disgruntled elected official told us:

"In the new system, the local union councillors and their nazims are elected directly, while the town and city council nazims are elected indirectly by us. Thus people in our area who have problems come to us to sort them out while we only have a monthly budget of Rs 75,000. After rent, salaries and utilities, there is hardly anything left. None of the proposals I have sent to the nazim of the Town Council have been approved. The road under construction you see outside has been in this condition for over a year."

And yet, despite the abject failure of the state in helping the poor (or perhaps because of it), there have been notable successes. For instance, many neighbourhoods have negotiated an arrangement with the KESC to supply electricity to a central point, and the people have undertaken the task of distributing it to homes. The electricity company is happy because it collects revenues more easily, and the citizens feel they have solved this problem through their own initiative. Every second house has a telephone and cable connection. To quote Arif Hasan again:

"Karachiites are living in dramatically better environmental conditions at the micro level in spite of increasingly bad conditions at the macro level. The number of one-room houses has fallen from 45 per cent to 30 per cent. ... and the number of three-room houses has increased from 14 per cent to 21 per cent. The number of houses with electricity connections has increased from 66 per cent in 1980 to 94 per cent in 1998 and the number of houses with piped water connections has increased from 44 per cent to 74 per cent in the same period..."

Clearly, the impact of these changes is bound to be profound. As urbanization forced the European feudal classes to share power with the bourgeoisie at the end of the middle ages, so too will an increasingly aware urban population in Pakistan demand the transfer of political power from the feudal-military nexus that has obtained the monopoly of power in Pakistan.