IT was the third week of September, and summer was refusing to go away. In fact, the weather was having its toll on Karachiites. On Sept 16, 1969, seven hyperpyrexia –– heat exhaustion fever –– patients were brought to the main hospitals of the city. Two of them, Mahboob and Salamat, had high temperatures –– 106.8 and 107.1 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively. They were brought in an unconscious state which meant their condition was critical. The rest were discharged from the hospitals when their condition improved after five to eight hours of medical attention. Most of the hyperpyrexia victims were labourers who were exposed to oppressive heat.

It was a tough time for members of the working class community. On Sept 18, four labourers were buried alive near Gizri when the top layers of the hillock they were digging came crashing down on them. The deceased were identified as Dawai Khan, Mohammad Din, Nek Mohammad and Rai Mohammad Khan.

They say, it never rains but it pours. At the time, Karachiites were also faced with a water scarcity problem (how new is that?). On Sept 19, a Karachi Development Authority (KDA) official said certain parts of the city would continue to experience water shortage until the middle of next month. Residents of Pakistan Employees Cooperative Housing Society, particularly those living in blocks II and VI, had been complaining about inadequate water supply for a long time. The KDA source added that the fixed quota of various water consuming bodies in the city had been curtailed because of the low velocity of water from the KDA’s main source, the Indus River. During August and September the Indus was flooded and the rate of silt in water was considerably increased. The muddy water had a low velocity and the KDA’s siphons were fed at a slow rate. It was due to this that the total water supply quota for Karachi had been slightly curtailed from around 85 million to 80 million gallons per day.

Things had come to such a pass that citizens had begun to think of new administrative solutions to their problems. On Sept 15, a deputation of the residents of Nazimabad and adjoining neighbourhoods called on the commissioner, Masood Nabi Noor, and urged him to create a separate municipality for the areas lying north of the Lyari River. The group comprised members of the Majils-i-Amal Anjuman Hai Nazimabad. It presented a memorandum to the commissioner in which it argued, among other things, that the Karachi Municipal Corporation (KMC) had failed to discharge its obligations to the taxpayers of these areas. It also pointed out that a separate municipality was promised for these areas by the Central Government at the time of planning Nazimabad Township. A new municipality would be in a better position to undertake development of under-developed areas of Golimar, Liaquatabad, Aurangabad, Qasimabad etc which had been devoid of all civic amenities for the previous 20 years.

On Sept 21, the media claimed that the government was considering the proposal for a separate municipality for Nazimabad. The consensus of opinion was that it was becoming ‘unwieldy’ for the KMC to manage the affairs of far-flung localities and that it would be better to create more municipalities.

While the status of some of the post-independence localities of the city was under scrutiny, the charm and position of the old town of Saddar was pretty much intact. On the afternoon of Sept 17, Crown Prince Hassan Bin Talal of Jordan visited the Quaid-i-Azam’s mausoleum. In the morning, the Jordanian prince, who was on the last leg of his five-day visit to Pakistan, went shopping in Saddar. He returned to Amman on the morning of Sept 18 from Karachi.

Published in Dawn, September 16th, 2019