NEVER are the shamefully dilapidated infrastructure and inadequate municipal functions in Pakistan’s largest city as exposed as they are during the rains. For that is when the daily aggravations its citizens struggle through suddenly become compressed within a short span of time. The downpour in various parts of Karachi since Monday night has claimed around 20 lives, mostly as a result of electrocution and house collapse. Low-lying areas have been inundated, while the gusty winds have brought down a number of billboards, uprooted trees and electric poles, disrupting power supply in some places. The rain — recorded at a maximum of 41mm by Monday night — also caused mayhem at the city’s vegetable and cattle markets.

Thunderstorms of this magnitude can test the resources of even the most well-administered urban centre — let alone a chaotic metropolis of 20m like Karachi where the authorities show little inclination for governance or the provision of facilities that are the citizens’ right. The city was thus utterly ill prepared to deal with this week’s deluge. Its residents would hardly have been surprised to learn that their hometown has been recently ranked (by the research and analysis division of The Economist Group) among the 10 least livable cities in the world. What other outcome was possible in a situation where the provincial government has rendered municipal authorities impotent and handed third-tier governance powers to entities under its control? What can one say when residents of a city which contributes 95pc of Sindh’s tax revenues and whose formal economy generates between 20-25pc of the country’s GDP are at risk of death during a rainstorm? Even while requirements such as that for low-income housing, public-sector health facilities, garbage disposal etc are ignored, work proceeds apace on initiatives that, while making fortunes for some powerful individuals, are destroying Karachi’s environment and exacerbating its ethnic and socioeconomic fault lines. It seems that Pakistan’s financial heart has been left to its own devices, not to mention the machinations of a predatory state.

Published in Dawn, August 24th, 2017