ONCE again we are hearing of two more agreements with a Chinese company to manage solid waste in Karachi. This time it is the district management councils of districts Malir and Karachi West that have authorised the agreements under the provincial government’s Solid Waste Management Board. One question that immediately leaps to mind is this: what happened when the last such arrangement was announced with a lot of fanfare? Districts South and East had inked similar agreements in the recent past, but the garbage problem in both areas failed to improve. It is the PPP-led government, which insists on retaining the responsibility of solid waste management and steadfastly refuses to devolve the task to the mayor’s office for its own political reasons, that must be blamed for the ineffective contracts they have entered into. Its neglect has allowed garbage to pile up in huge quantities around the city.

The consequences are gruesome for the poor citizens who have to suffer the brunt of this colossal failure of governance. Informal contractors currently collect the garbage from various areas and prefer to dump it in empty lots where it is burned once the piles become too large, sending vast plumes of toxic smoke wafting over entire neighbourhoods. Alternatively, garbage is also dumped into the sea by unscrupulous contractors; it washes ashore as the tide turns, leaving the city’s beaches littered with waste. The sheer indifference that the authorities have shown towards this horrific situation is now emblematic of the Sindh government’s style of politics, which revolves mostly around rallies, rhetoric and rackets. Karachi is littered with examples of deep misgovernance, while the Chinese are being asked to fill the vacuum. This is a deeply flawed and unsustainable model, and one suspects that those directing these arrangements through the DMCs know this but could not care less. No foreign enterprise can solve the governance problems of Karachi if the city authorities themselves remain indifferent to their responsibilities.

Published in Dawn, October 8th, 2017