ISLAMABAD, Aug 1: Pakistan People’s Party information secretary Sherry Rehman on Tuesday slammed the Sindh government for what she said its apathy towards Karachi, which collapsed after 79 millimetres of rain.

She said 24 persons including a pregnant woman, and several children, had met with tragic deaths in the rain, where all of the city’s resources and infrastructure had totally been wiped out in only two days rain.

People were living in sub-human conditions, battling with burst sewerage pipes, nullahs flowing into homes, power cuts for 36 hours and clogged roads which had no provision for drainage even after billions of rupees had been spent on roads and bypasses.

It is a shame that Karachi, which pays the highest revenues to the exchequer, faces crisis after crisis just to survive on fresh air, she added.

The financial capital of the country not only saw its lights go for months, it also faced the fallout of corrupt officials and poor governance as even main arteries like Chundrigar Road became a death trap with no drainage and covers for man-holes, sucking in people and vehicles in its crippling vice. It is not as if monsoon rains don’t hit Karachi every July, so why were the storm drains left clogged, especially after fanfare from the city government that we are re-vamping them, she said.

What was the point of building fancy fountains that cost the city Rs230 million, when basic utilities and structures were not available at any cost, she asked.

Hundreds of people have been crowding KESC complaint centres all over Karachi in distress after they have suffered for months on end, but no one listens, she said. It is a matter of shocking public record that sixty per cent of Karachi is without power today.

Rehman said that not only has the Musharraf regime not generated one megawatt of power since 1999, it is living off the IPPs that the PPP installed even today.

The PPP set up plants that charged Rs4 per unit, but the Musharraf regime charges Rs12 per unit and congratulates itself for high power costs, ignoring the fact that urban Pakistan is imploding under the shoddy governance and mismanagement of the day.

She said Sindh is a victim of the unnatural alliances formed without representative political forces in its government, and will continue to pay a dear price for the military regime’s desperation to forge unstable governments at the expense of its people.