THEY say, it never rains but it pours. It was a difficult week for Karachiites in terms of commuting. With the fast growing population, the city needed more and more public transport facilities. The authorities had taken some concrete steps, such as the one of signing a deal with the Swedish government as has been mentioned before, to make things convenient for commuters. But on Nov 16, 1967 more than 100 buses of the Khalid Riffat Transport Company (KRTC) went off the road following a strike by their drivers and conductors. Apparently, the strike was in protest against the company management’s inability to keep their promise of improving work conditions of its employees. There was more to the strike which had paralysed traffic on many important routes of the city: on Nov 15, during a routine checking run, the police held two drivers for speeding and were later fined Rs400 each by a court. Since they couldn’t pay the fine, they were sent to jail. The drivers were of the view that their management should have paid the fine. Not to be. The company management replied that those who committed an offence must pay for it themselves, not their employers.

When the strike reached a cul-de-sac and both parties behaved in a standoffish manner causing inconvenience to the people who travelled by bus, alternative transport arrangements on the affected routes were made. The strike situation, by the way, had become pretty complicated because the management of the transport company had been taken over by a bank.

Tackling the transport problem was one issue; the city administrators had too much on their plate on Nov 16. That day the council of the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) formally voted to create a research chair in science at the University of Karachi named after President Ayub Khan. The resolution was moved by the corporation’s vice chairman M. Ziaullah who ‘obtained’ the president’s consent on Oct 31 during his stay in the city on his return from abroad.

The same day the council also resolved to plan a township along Hawkesbay Road to rehabilitate the people shifted from unauthorised huts in municipal limits. The resolution was unanimously approved after the house fully endorsed the views of KMC Chairman Pervaiz Ahmed Butt to make it [shifting] more practicable.

One of the reasons for transferring people from huts to proper housing facilities was to save them from diseases that can be contracted in underprivileged localities because the city was already battling diphtheria at the time. On Nov 15, the data collected from the Epidemic Disease Hospital revealed that the hospital had treated 2995 diphtheria patients in the past six years and the number of patients was gradually rising, especially in Karachi. The increase in the number in the city was put down to a lack of an immunisation programme. The mortality rate, however, showed a decline mainly because of timely diagnosis of the disease.

The word timely could also be applied to an inquiry that the KMC began on Nov 18 into the mystery behind the slaughter of a striped hyena in the Zoological Gardens on Nov 16. One of the two hyenas was killed at night by an unknown person; to boot, its corpse had also gone missing. A number of zoo employees were being questioned, and the Garden police too were involved in the case, looking for the killer.

Published in Dawn, November 13th, 2017