KARACHI: Mayor Wasim Akhtar said on Saturday that the city’s civic problems could be solved within a few years if the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation got its share of octroi from the provincial government.

“The municipal administration of the city gets only Rs6 billion out of its total share of Rs14bn,” he said, adding that the rights of the people of Karachi were being usurped due to politics.

The mayor was addressing the participants of a ceremony held at the Nazimabad Homeopathic Hospital to mark the 264th birthday of Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathic medicine.

He asked why the metro bus system was not set up in Karachi when mega projects were being launched in other cities of the country. “When we demand projects for the uplift of the city, we are told that there are no funds under this head,” he said.

The mayor said that the city’s medical institutions were in a very poor condition when the MQM-led city government was formed. “We worked day and night for bringing improvement in medical facilities run by the KMC and bought medicines for Rs170 million,” he said.

Published in Dawn, April 14th, 2019