HOW times change! There was once a Ghora Gari Walla Union in Karachi. For the uninitiated, a ghora gari is a horse-driven carriage, a handful of which you may still, in 2018, come across in what we call the old city. The ghora garis were used, especially in the 1950s and ‘60s, as public transport. So when motor vehicles began to hog the major space on Karachi’s roads, and laws for public transport became more stringent, it became a little cause for concern for the above-mentioned group.

On July 6, 1958, the Ghora Ghari Walla Union held a meeting at which its members demanded that they be treated on a par with motor-taxi drivers. They wished to run their carriages on all the roads in the city. They felt that they were gradually being pushed from the main roads despite the fact that their carriages were vehicles meant for public transport –– and where a taxi could go, a horse-driven carriage could also go, they argued, adding that the discrimination was most prominent at the Karachi Port Trust, where the ghora garis, also known as victorias, were not allowed beyond the main gate whereas the taxis could drive all the way to the passenger shed. This was greatly affecting their already lean business, they lamented.

While one may come across a horse-carriage these days, but with the advent of the smartphone, there are no telephone booths left in Karachi. On July 3, this newspaper published a picture of a booth near the General Post Office which had gone out of order. The big box was seen locked causing inconvenience for many people who would come to it to make a telephone call, and now had no other telephone nearby booth to turn to because the number of public call offices in working order was already on the low side. The bright white words printed on the blackened glass of the doors read: Telephone Public Call Office. The post office authorities closed it down sometime ago when the telephone went out of order, and parts of the instrument began to disappear mysteriously. (Nothing new about that.)

Speaking of closing things down, that week the Karachi Development Authority (KDA) was in a bad mood, which might have led to the shutting down of some amenities provided to citizens. On July 2, it was announced that the KDA had started a survey to claim all the money that the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) had collected in an unauthorised way from the property owners of Federal B Area and North Nazimabad during the previous several years on account of water taxes. Officials of the authority had begun visiting the zonal office of the KMC which kept a record of the taxes recovered from the landlords of the two townships since 1963. After collecting the final figures, the authority was thinking that a demand would be put up to the KMC to reimburse the amount. The whole thing had started because, although KMC had taken over both townships for the maintenance of various services etc, it had refused to assume responsibility for the water supply system. Since the KDA was still running the water system, its officials thought it was the only competent authority to collect water taxes. Inquires showed that water taxes in Federal B Area and North Nazimabad had been collected both by the KMC and the KDA. The KMC collected it along with the other taxes on the basis of the assessment of rental value of properties by the Directorate of Excise and Taxation. This dated back to 1963 in the case of North Nazimabad and 1965 in the case of Federal B Area. The corporation started collecting these taxes from the property owners of the two townships before taking them over from the KDA under the general permission given to it by the provincial government to impose certain taxes.

Published in Dawn, July 2nd, 2018

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