LAST week’s monsoon rains in Karachi have wreaked havoc on its upscale and lower-income areas alike. Well-heeled residents of the ‘posh’ Defence Housing Authority, furious at the collapse of civic services on account of the downpour, gathered on Monday to protest outside the office of the Cantonment Board Clifton which provides municipal cover to DHA (and a large number of other localities within its jurisdiction). They demanded that top DHA and CBC officials resign, that inundated areas in Defence Society be drained and water, gas and power supplies restored expeditiously. In the long run, they pressed for the reconstruction of infrastructure, accountability of officials and a forensic audit of CBC and DHA accounts. At one point, irked by the absence of any CBC or DHA official to come and speak with them, the protesters forced their way into the building, leaving the policemen present at the site flummoxed as to how to respond to a mob comprising the ‘elite’.

After decades of neglect, a sustained improvement in Karachi’s civic services can only be achieved through comprehensive, structural reform. Piecemeal and superficial measures, taken along the same fragmented lines of authority as exist today in the city are not the answer. The metropolis must have a unified command structure for consistency of services and accountability of personnel. In the administrative hotchpotch that prevails at present, everyone passes the buck and no one is held responsible. Some anomalies are immediately obvious, such as the jurisdiction of cantonments, of which there are six in Karachi. As per the Cantonment Act 1924, cantonments are defined as “any place … in which any part of the regular forces or the regular air force of Pakistan is quartered … or is required for the service of such forces…”. With reference to Monday’s protest, what is the rationale for Clifton Cantonment to sprawl over an area of 9,953 acres when its operational area is only 58 acres? To comply with the law would also mean a belated implementation of a Supreme Court judgement in 2007 that ordered civilian areas to be excluded from the cantonment boards through a notification by the defence ministry. With the prime minister to shortly visit Karachi, this is the time for the Sindh government to demonstrate its willingness to appoint a fully empowered city administrator. There must be a governance pyramid for the metropolis, with the administrator’s office at the very top.

Published in Dawn, September 2nd, 2020