KARACHIITES had been waiting for a few weeks for the monsoons to arrive, to no avail. Instead, they were only being greeted with negligible showers. Things changed a weenie bit on July 9, 1968 when life in the city moved at a snail’s pace as motorists drove around at an unusually reduced speed because the intermittent light drizzles had made the roads slippery. This meant that the drivers were extra cautious moving their cars from one place to another. City roads where animal-driven vehicles ran had become even more dangerous because, according to a news item, horse feces mixed with the wetness caused by the drizzle resulted in making the roads slipperier.

But communication systems — motorised, electronic or manual — on the whole had seldom been a problem for Karachiites, primarily due to the fact that the city administrators at the time had communication at the top of their priority list and did not want it to get disrupted for a long stretch of time. Here’s an example of a particular kind of communication system. On July 11, the director general of the Telephone and Telegraph Department at a press conference said that at least 1,000 new telephone connections would be given each month by the department to the citizens during the ongoing financial year. He estimated that in 1968-69 about 10,000 to 12,000 new connections would be provided. The pace might be accelerated later as the plan’s target for Karachi was an additional 40,000 telephones by mid-1970. Ah, little did the DG know that a few decades later the mobile phone services would make the process of connecting with each other as easy as pie.

Not that the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) was sitting idle at the time. In those days, as has often been written in this space, the corporation was the most efficient body of the city. On July 13, its Committee for the Cattle Colony Project finalised a draft proposal for the development of the Landhi Cattle Colony to be submitted before a council meeting. The seven-member committee was constituted the previous month in pursuance of the directive of the provincial government to the KMC to find out ways of ‘preserving better quality of milk cattle in the colony’.

Now here’s another example that will give the readers a sense of how seriously the KMC and other institutions took issues related to hygiene. The corporation had undertaken for more than a year a campaign to kill rats as they had spawned in a big number in the city. They caused a major health scare. But the drive had lately slowed down. So, on July 12, the Health Department of the Karachi Municipal Corporation sat down to seek out new devices in the ‘warfare between mice and men’ in the city. Official figures showed that the current rate of rat-killing by the municipal rat-trapping squads had decreased by nearly 50 per cent in comparison with the previous year. In June 1968, the rat-trappers managed to kill only 3,000 rodents whereas in 1967 the same number of rats was taken care of in just a fortnight. Experts were of the opinion that there were nearly 100,000 rodents in Karachi – a rat was born every two minutes, they said.

Interesting st(rat)istics, isn’t it?

Published in Dawn, July 9th, 2018

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