A day after an eight-year-old boy drowned in an uncovered manhole in Karachi’s Mehran town, Mayor Murtaza Wahab urged people not to politicise the issue, saying that the child fell because the manhole cover “had been removed and put on the side”.

According to the Edhi Foundation, the number of people who died after falling into open manholes and drains across the metropolis rose to 27 in the outgoing year of 2025. Eight of them are children, the data says.

The child, identified as Dilbar, was playing outside his residence with other area children when the tragedy occurred, Korangi Senior Superintendent Police (SSP) Fida Husain Janwari told Dawn.

Speaking to the media today, Mayor Wahab, in response to a fiery question about the issue of missing manhole covers, particularly the death of a child a day earlier and reports of missing covers on II Chundrigar Road, said: “The reports I have so far received from locals, I am in touch with the child’s family, indicate that it was not that there was no cover at all, but that it had been removed and placed on the side.”

Noting the tone of the question, he remarked, “Now that this question has been recorded, it will go viral, and that, unfortunately, is the real issue”.

He maintained that the issue could not be looked at through a “political lens”.

“The first thing I checked was if the Union Council […] was given the additional Rs100,000 I had announced? Yes, the money was disbursed.“

“The point being that we did whatever was in our capacity, but if someone removed the cover and put it on the side, then it is a problem that can not be seen through a political lens,” Mayor Wahab maintained.

He stressed that it was vital to “look at what the real issue is“.

In reference to PTI‘s Alamgir Khan, who is known for his ‘Fix It’ campaign, the mayor said, “Yesterday, a person from a certain party went to II Chundrigar and said that his team had installed missing covers; however, later they went missing”.

“So did I remove the covers?” he asked.

“It means someone stole them,“ he said, urging people to address the issue “based on merits, rather than politicising it”.

Earlier this month, the body of a three-year-old boy, Ibrahim, who fell into an open manhole in Karachi’s Gulshan-i-Iqbal was recovered on December 1, more than 12 hours after the incident was first reported.

Following the tragedy, many political parties held protests against the provincial administration and demanded that the Karachi mayor resign, while pleas were also filed in courts demanding action against city officials.

The incident also prompted the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) to increase the budget of 246 union committees (UCs) to exclusively maintain manhole covers and streetlights.