KARACHI: Nobody in the audience expressed any surprise or raised a question when seasoned architect and urban planner Arif Hasan presented a very bleak picture of Karachi’s future during a lecture at the PMA House on Monday.

Perhaps, people in attendance already had an idea where poor governance that they had been experiencing for many years could lead to.

“In coming years, Karachi is likely to experience the kind of traffic problems Bangkok faced in mid-1990s. It took travellers three to four hours to reach their destination during those days,” said Mr Hasan, who was delivering the first Ardeshir Cowasjee Memorial Lecture on urbanisation trends and future of the city.

The event was organised by Ardeshir Cowasjee Memorial Lecture Organising Committee and the Pakistan Medical Association.

This traffic scenario, he explained, would develop owing to the massive infrastructural development taking place in the city without a project design and continued addition of vehicles on roads.

“Currently, 120 buildings having stories between 20 and 50 are being constructed in the city. What worries me more is not the fact that buildings under construction lacked provision of water or electricity as there are examples [in the world] where basic utilities were provided later. But, the absence of any vision, any project design,” he told the audience.

Expert says government is allowing more and more vehicles on roads yet ignoring fuel stocks

At the same time, he said, the government was encouraging vehicles’ import and supporting the automobile industry to set up more plants, ignoring the fuel stocks available in the country.

He strongly criticised the government for bringing pro-builder laws and policies. Under the high-density zone act, the government deliberately commercialised a number of corridors and allowed construction of high-rises to earn profit, he said.

“The members of its nine-member board are either builders or members of political parties. The builders have the patronage of politicians who have destroyed institutions by forcing the good officers to leave and appointing incompetent persons,” he said, adding that there was a nexus between politicians and builders.

He also flayed the government decision of contracting out important municipal functions and taking up the project of Karachi’s improvement without inviting public comments.

“The city has been handed over to contractors. Where is the regulatory authority? The common man is the loser in such public-private ventures as he fails to get any service.”

The government, in his opinion, should have informed the public through the media about Karachi’s uplift project being executed with the help of World Bank loan.

Highlighting some other factors that complicate Karachi’s situation, according to him, was continued migration which, he said, would increase particularly from the interior districts of Sindh and the Seraiki belt undergoing great social and cultural changes.

On Karachi’s water woes, he said that shortages were related to operational and maintenance issues and the government never bothered to take relevant expert advice.

He suggested land reforms, launch of low-cost housing schemes for the poor and the revival of the local body responsible for designing and developing city’s plans as important steps to bring improvement.

Earlier, Dr Mirza Ali Azhar, Dr Shershah Syed and senior journalist Zubeida Mustafa paid tributes to Mr Cowasjee and remembered him as a bold and fearless person who fought for Karachi, its people, heritage and environment.

“He was a visionary, a voice of the nation’s conscience and an institution unto himself. His death has left a vacuum that perhaps would never fill up,” Dr Azhar remarked.

Karachi University students also read out passages from Cowasjee’s columns.

Published in Dawn, April 24th, 2018