EVEN by end of June, and despite the weather being gloomy and the light drizzle a week before, Karachiites had not received the first burst of rain of the summer of 1968. On June 26, the meteorology department said the main monsoon currents, rising from the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, were over Nagpur and Calcutta (now Kolkata) and near Bombay (now Mumbai), but the distance was of no consequence because everything depended on “depression”. In Karachi, the normal arrival date for the monsoons was July 15 and the department suspected it could extend or move back about 10 days. Having said that, since the nightmare of the July rains of 1967 was still fresh in citizens’ minds, all civic agencies were busy preparing for the expected rainfall. They had, in fact, spurred their activities because of the ‘forecast’ of a downpour.

But for the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation the weather was not exactly the top priority at the time because the same day, June 26, chairman of the corporation Parvez Ahmad Bhutt presented to the house the budget estimates for 1968-69. He claimed that the KMC had been successful in sufficiently providing civic services and other amenities to the citizens over the previous 30 months, and the credit went mainly to the city fathers who gave intelligent and sympathetic guidance to the executive in every step of the way. Giving a brief account of the main sources of anticipated revenues during the next year, he told the house that receipts from the octroi duty occupied a very significant position in the scheme of things. They had gone up from Rs35.1 million in 1966-67 to Rs42m in 1967-68, and might reach Rs60m in the next year. He, however, also informed the councillors “with a heavy heart” that the KMC’s Rs6m deposit in the National Commercial Bank had more or less sunk. The unfortunate part of the story, the chairman bemoaned, was that all this money was a sacred trust of the “poor taxpayers of the city”.

On June 27, a protest walkout by the opposition at the very outset of proceedings forced an adjournment of the second day of the budget session owing to the lack of a quorum. The walkout followed a ruling of the KMC chairman giving only five minutes to each speaker. He had earlier explained that the time limit was necessary in view of the long list of members — 21 in all — who wanted to speak on the occasion. The opposition wanted more time to enable each member to explain his or her point of view.

The KMC, by the way, had already begun planning infrastructural development even before the budged estimates were announced. On June 24, it proposed to build three new bridges across the Lyari river within the next couple of years. The proposed sites of the new road-over bridges were Shershah Road, Mewashah Road and the Love Lane causeway. This had been necessitated because the two bridges across the river at Tin Hatti and Lasbela House had not proved sufficient to cope with the huge traffic between the newly-developed areas, the industrial belt and the old city. The proposal was something that town planners did not see eye to eye on with the corporation. They believed the real solution to Karachi’s traffic problems lay in providing more roads and link-bridges. And the problem lingers on…

Published in Dawn, June 25th, 2018