For thousands of Karachi’s industrial workers, the daily commute is less about distance and more about endurance. Muhammad Ali leaves his Baloch Colony home an hour before his 8am shift at a SITE area pharmaceutical plant. While he can zip 14 kilometres to Nazimabad in 15 minutes via the Karsaz corridor, the final 6km crawl to his factory takes twice as long, choked by potholes and gridlock. Across town in the Korangi Industrial Area, refinery worker Ishtiaq Ali loses four hours a day to public transport navigating endless construction and broken roads.

In Pakistan’s largest industrial city, crumbling infrastructure and traffic bottlenecks have turned the simple act of going to work into an exhausting daily ordeal.

The strain is not felt by workers alone. Every day, fleets of heavy vehicles transporting raw materials and finished goods through Karachi’s industrial zones – from SITE and Korangi to Landhi, North Karachi, and Federal B Area – are trapped in hours of gridlock.

For the thousands of enterprises powering the nation’s economy, these dilapidated roads are more than a nuisance; they are a direct hit to the bottom line, bleeding capital through inflated fuel bills, damaged cargo, and costly delays.

Dilapidated roads are inflicting huge financial losses on industrialists through rising fuel costs, longer travel time

But commuting is only one of the problems confronting the city’s industrial zones. Poor sanitation, water shortages, ineffective waste-disposal systems and deteriorating drainage networks have added to the difficulties faced by businesses and workers. Yet the condition of the infrastructure serving these industrial hubs raises questions about whether essential public services are keeping pace with their economic importance.

Earlier last month, the situation compelled Karachi’s industrial, business and trade community to come together and openly voice concerns over, what they described as, the economic cost of civic mismanagement that is driving up production costs and undermining competitiveness.

At a meeting, representatives of Karachi-based trade bodies and industrial town associations questioned how the country’s commercial capital that contributes around 67pc of federal revenue and 54pc of national exports “continues to suffer from crumbling roads, acute water shortages, unreliable utilities, deteriorating sewerage and rampant street crime”.

The condition of the infrastructure serving the industrial hubs raises questions about whether essential public services are keeping pace with their economic importance.

While calling for an urgent, coordinated drive to “rescue Karachi from its deepening civic and economic crisis”, Zubair Motiwala, the chairman of Businessmen Group, has made it clear that their criticism was not aimed at creating any political or administrative controversy, but it was for a liveable, secure and economically competitive Karachi.

However, an industrialist, who attended the meeting but doesn’t want to be named, says that the participants openly expressed their frustration with the PPP administration in the province and lamented that despite ruling Sindh for the past 18 years, the party has ignored the infrastructure that is still in a shambles.

“The seriousness of the provincial government can be gauged from the fact that it had, in December 2025, approved over Rs9 billion for urgent road repairs and infrastructure maintenance in Karachi’s industrial areas, but even after 10 months, the work remains incomplete or has not even begun.”

The industrialist was referring to the allocation for the uplift of industrial areas by Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah.Recently, Korangi Industrial Trading Estate CEO Saleemuz Zaman highlighted the urgent need for sewerage and infrastructure improvements in areas adjoining the main roads of his industrial estate at the groundbreaking ceremony of the project to improve infrastructure. “The infrastructure challenges are so extensive that the Rs2bn allocation is insufficient to address all the requirements,” he told the participants in the ceremony.

Karachi Mayor Murtaza Wahab assured the KATI members that the government would further increase the allocation in the next financial year as it knew the provision of quality roads, improved drainage systems and modern infrastructure would not only facilitate industrialists but also strengthen commercial activities, create employment opportunities and contribute to the national economy.

Industrialists have identified institutional incompetence, weak accountability and administrative failures as basic reasons behind the city’s longstanding problems like road conditions, traffic diversions, water supply, drainage and waste disposal. They call for timely completion of projects, improved coordination among the relevant authorities and oversight for effective service delivery.

In the words of KATI’s Deputy Patron-in-Chief Zubair Chhaya, the city’s industrialists need a coordinated and apolitical campaign to resolve worsening civic and economic issues where the priority must be implementation and accountability.

Although the Sindh government is taking measures to resolve the chronic issues, until there is timely progress on the infrastructure projects, workers will continue to face lengthy commutes and industries will continue to experience cost and time overruns in transporting raw materials and finished goods.

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, November 9th, 2026