THAT the government has finally started looking at alternative ways to finance the long-delayed Karachi-Peshawar Main Line-1 railway project after the Chinese funding for the crucial transport scheme failed to materialise is a good sign. But the outcome of Friday’s review of the proposal to construct the 460km Rohri-Multan section — estimated to cost over Rs450bn — shows that our planners have not even finalised the plan let alone secured alternative funding sources. The secretaries of the federal ministries involved sent their juniors to represent them. This means that the bureaucracy does not expect this project to take off anytime soon. It is telling that the committee, headed by the planning minister, declined to clear the FWO’s proposal for being incomplete, and ordered an independent audit of the very costing the organisation had prepared.

Simply put, the government is still assembling basic numbers like construction costs, rolling-stock requirements, revenue potential etc for a railway line it has promoted for the better part of a decade. ML-1 is not an ordinary project; it is the backbone connecting Karachi’s ports to the rest of the country, and its condition determines how much it costs to move goods to and from the port. A faster line would cut freight transit times and lower the logistics burden that currently eats into the competitiveness of our exports. It would also mean safer and more comfortable passenger travel on a network where the deteriorating track has been linked to accidents, as the committee itself was briefed. Every year ML-1 stays unbuilt, Pakistan pays more to trade and asks its citizens to travel on tracks its own officials call unsafe. What the meeting confirms is that Beijing’s promised financing for the project is no longer forthcoming. For years, the promised investment was pitched as the backbone of ML-1. Now the government is struggling to fill the gap. Whether it can do so remains to be seen.

Published in Dawn, August 30th, 2026