KARACHI, April 19: Lyari, one of the oldest localities of the city, is being faced with numerous problems including lack of amenities, poverty, pollution, unemployment, illiteracy, drugs, law and order situation and with the addition of gang-wars the sufferings of the area people have increased manifold.
History of the locality shows that the British government had always treated it essentially a labourer-class area being inhabited by squatters and thus there was little urgency to plan for its uplift. The little that existed crumbled as a result of the post-partition influx of immigrants.
The history of the Balochs in Karachi is as old as the city itself. Historians generally believe that at least till the 18th century, this port city was a settlement of the Baloch Kolachi tribe who had migrated from Mekran.
Lyari has an estimated 40-50 per cent Baloch population which migrated from the surrounding countryside and got employed with the railways, docks, tanneries, oil processing mills or wool-washing factories located along the Lyari River.
After 1872, the first residential centres of Khadda, Baghdadi, Old Kumharwara, Kalakot, Miranaka, Nawabad, Darayabad and Dhobi Ghat were expanded. Besides, new factories sprung up as a result of their removal from other sectors of the city where their trades were classified as ‘dangerous and offensive’.
Regretfully, even after the creation of Pakistan, the same British policy of indifference towards Lyari had been persistently pursued by the successive governments. The locality has been either treated as a source of cheap labour or vote-bank. It was for this reason that efforts had been made by successive rulers to keep the locality backward.
Until the late 1960s, Lyari mainly consisted of wooden and mud houses, there were few pucca structures. There was neither proper water supply nor a drainage system—only community posts for getting potable water.
In the absence of any drainage system, it often took months to pump out standing rainwater. Mostly houses were without electricity and gas, whereas phones and TV were considered a privilege of the few.
The same was the case with education. A working class family could not think of sending their children to school. Even though it was the main source of manpower supply to the city’s labour market, industrialisation in the ’60s created large scale unemployment owing to the arrival of upcountry workers.
In the early ’70s gradually, poverty gave way to better living condition in some segments of the populace. Trade and construction activity picked up. Within a decade, the once-sprawling shanty town acquired a new busy and relatively prosperous look with an emerging middle class.
However, the situation abruptly changed in the 1980s, ’90s and later on when construction boom in the middle eastern countries came to a halt which resulted in drastic cuts in the foreign remittances leaving several families in poverty.
The situation helped drug lords spread their tentacles by employing poor and unemployed youth in their syndicates. The business boomed with the support of police personnel. The drug mafia has unleashed a reign of terror in the locality which has resulted in the killings of many innocent people including the founder chairman of the Baloch Ittehad Tehrik, Anwar Bhaijan Baloch.
These so-called gang-wars have transformed Lyari into a dreaded and forsaken place. A near total lack of civic facilities including acute water shortages, frequent prolonged power failures, illegal construction and occupation of buildings by the land and crime mafias and a road system that exists only in name have compounded the problems of the locality.
Besides, the lack of open spaces, recreational facilities and presence of several hundred warehouses and factories storing and manufacturing hazardous materials have made Lyari’s one million residents to live under extremely unsafe and stifling conditions.
The Lyari Town administration that took charge of the 11 union councils has been totally ineffective in tackling these issues, especially the gang-wars which has also rendered the political leadership ineffective who seems to be unprepared to play any role.
The high-ups of the city administration cannot absolve themselves from the responsibility of maintaining law and order by deploying additional law enforcement personnel to crush the immediate threat posed to public life and property by warring gangs.