The boys who studied at the BVS Parsi High School between 1920 and 1946 were most fortunate, for during those years Maneck Bejonjee Pithawalla, Doctor of Science, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of England, Fellow of the Geological Society (England), was the principal of our school. He left to become professor of geography and geology at the Nadirshaw Eduljee Dinshaw Engineering College (which became the NED University of Engineering and Technology) and later moved on to the University of Sindh as dean of the faculty of science. In the good old days teachers were men of learning, and no one doubted that brain took precedence over brawn.
In 1946, Dr Pithawalla published his book 'An Introduction to Karachi' in which he recorded:
"Karachi is a mushroom city, ever expanding over a tract of sand, its edges submerged for extensive distances to different depths at different states of the tide. Groynes are built from time to time, thus changing the shape of the submersible portions. There is a complicated cantonment boundary in the heart of the municipal area, a second smaller cantonment at Manora, several outlying places like Baba and Bhit, of undefined extent and only partially under municipal control and numerous distant patches of irregular shape and size like the Municipal Quarries".
Then comes a warning : "Like all other cities Karachi must have some kind of planning before it is too late. Already it has reached a stage when an extensive Improvement Trust under the Town Planning Act will have to be instituted to make alignments of many old roads and cross-roads and their corners, to remove congestion in the old town and neighbouring areas, to provide for well-planned houses for the poor labour class, to remove the obstacles of warehouses and godowns in the heart of the city, to relieve Bunder Road of some of the load of traffic, to look to the drainage difficulties, to protect the city against fire, earthquake, seaquake, disease, etc."
Over the next sixty years, as the population of this city grew from 300,000 to 13 million, a number of city planning agencies succeeded each other - from the original Karachi Improvement Trust all the way down to the present Master Plan Group of Offices of the city government. But the city developed without the implementation of any master plan, or for that matter without any planning of any sort. Saddar Bazaar, which includes 'a complicated cantonment boundary', and which has always been and remains the virtual hub of this city has been a particular victim of vested interests, and together with the larger part of this city has evolved into an overcrowded slum, with utility shortages, traffic jams, overloaded public transport systems, mass encroachments, an ever- rising crime rate, almost unbearable air and noise pollution - great contributors to the air pollution being the burners used by the hundreds of jewellers' workshops which blight the area.
At one time the cantonment areas of our cities, such as Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Multan and Quetta, were the cleanest and most well maintained sections, and for a good reason - the cantonment chiefs were officers of the army engineering regiments, or officers qualified to plan. Sadly, no longer. The present-day administrators of the cantonments of Pakistan are normally neither engineers nor planners, and whoever or whatever they be, many of them have succumbed to the all-consuming rational greed for pelf and plots.
The 1974 KDA master plan, 'Karachi Development Plan,' recommended that those portions of the 29,000 acres of cantonments and lands under defence control that were not essential for 'defence purposes' be converted to normal urban uses. It specifically stated : "Karachi Cantonment has been completely surrounded by civilian population and is in the very heart of the city. It cannot be treated as a separate entity for planning , and development is not possible as long as Karachi Cantonment remains an island in the city. Major metropolitan road networks and land uses have to be linked across the Cantonment area ..... Collaboration should be initiated between the Defence Authorities and the Master Plan Department in planning the conversion of the Karachi Cantonment area by 1985...". No action was taken.
In the early 1980s, for no good but obvious reasons, Blocks 8 and 9 of KDA Scheme No.5, Kahkashan/Clifton (falling between Clifton Road from the Teen Talwar roundabout to the Do Talwar roundabout and Khyaban-e-Hafiz) were transferred to the Clifton Cantonment jurisdiction. These planned residential areas have been indiscriminately commercialized. At every stage of the commercialization, in which the Clifton Cantonment Board was instrumental, vast amounts of money passed from hand to hand.
Over the past two weeks, citizens of Karachi have been made aware through a blitz of quarter-page newspaper advertisements and seven-minute TV shots, that they just cannot afford not to own a shop in 'Atrium Mall', a multi-storeyed commercial plaza coming up at the congested intersection of Zaibunissa (Elphinstone) Street and Sarwar Shaheed (Inverarity) Road in the over-crowded Saddar area.
Iqbal Machiyara, one of the 'Atrium Mall' project sponsors and a developer of renown, boasts that he has constructed nine projects along Shareah Faisal. Interestingly, all these projects are unauthorized, detrimental to the environment, and were declared so in a notice inserted in the press on September 1, 1998 by the Karachi Building Control Authority which described them as 'potentially dangerous' and 'constructed in violation of earthquake resistance design'.
'Atrium Mall' is located in the residential staff lines area of Karachi Cantonment, the original planning of which did not provide for any commercialization of the plot on which it is situated. Over the years, the Cantonment authorities have arbitrarily converted residential plots in the E.I. Lines, N. I. Lines, R. A. Lines and contiguous areas to intense commercial use without first undertaking a proper town-planning exercise. Such an exercise would have thoroughly examined all the related factors, such as traffic flow, planning of the locality, harmful effects on the environment, etc. It would have provided, in advance, for the enhanced utilities (electricity, water, sewerage, etc) and requisite infrastructure, and it would have invited and then ensured consideration of public objections to the land-use conversion.
During peak hours in the afternoons and evenings, the traffic congestion that occurs on Sarwar Shaheed and Fatima Jinnah roads is already so massive that traffic policemen are regularly stationed there to clear traffic jams. The consequences of the construction of many additional hundreds of thousands of square feet of shopping areas at this location are inconceivable. The car-parking spaces required for shops, restaurants, and the theatre and auditorium project would amount to some 450. The builders are providing 125 parking slots. The remainder will have to take their chances on the surrounding streets. Under the bye-laws, on public roads in commercial areas, many thousands of square feet of loading/unloading spaces have to be provided in order to prevent the blockage of road traffic by vehicles which have stopped temporarily to load/unload goods and materials. No such square footage has been made available (as it has not all over the Saddar area).
Way back in 1952, the Karachi Improvement Trust established road-widening cut-lines on Inverarity (Sarwar Shaheed) Road and Elphinstone (Zaibunissa) Street, both of which affect the 'Atrium Mall' plot. It was determined that Inverarity Road would have to be widened from 70 feet to 120 feet to handle the fast increasing traffic. The city planners foresaw this traffic problem in 1952 (when Karachi's population was 1.1 million). Can the governor of Sindh and the Nazim explain why the city's policy-makers, after a period of 50 years, with a ten-fold increase in the city's population, are blind to the needs of the present and of the future? Could it be greed? Could it be graft? How much of the Rs.18,000 to Rs.20,000 per square foot selling price that the builders are charging is being distributed to government and elected officials whose duty it is to protect the environment and the city?
It is incredible that permission was given for such a complex to be raised on this particular plot in this area. Numerous other illegal commercial projects in the area, including 'Madina Centre,' 'Rio Centre,' and 'Rex Centre,' on the opposite side of the road, are fortunately at present largely empty. The 'Panorama Centre' next door was a large commercial failure of the mid-1970s as shoppers were reluctant to move beyond Inverarity Road.
The collusion between the bureaucrats of the Karachi Cantonment Board in allowing the proliferation of illegal and environment-unfriendly buildings in their jurisdiction ('Navinta Shopping Mall,' 'Jeddah Centre,' 'International Shopping Centre,' 'Panorama Centre,' 'Naz Plaza', 'Jinnah Plaza', 'Rainbow Centre, etc) should be tackled and halted immediately by the military authorities before more irrevocable damage is done to this unfortunate city.
The men in authority are satiated. The judiciary may perhaps help the people.