Dealing with Karachi’s Problems

By Taj Haider | December 2019

Constant economic migration into the city coupled with severe lack of resources are two perennial problems that continue to remain the main and basic hurdles in the development of Karachi. However, we should also keep in mind that the constitutional duty of every Government is to bring underdeveloped areas at par with the developed areas. This of course is a very difficult task but reducing the gap between the developed and backward areas cannot be undertaken without a judicious distribution of the available but meager financial resources.

There does exist a problem of looking down upon the rural population. They grow the food which the city populations survive upon. However, when it comes to distribution of resources and provision of basic amenities and utility services, villages are totally sidelined. Agricultural land is limited and the rural population is increasing exponentially. Thus, a continuous migration from the rural to the urban areas for economic survival is taking place and is putting increased pressure on the cities. We must remember that unless our villages prosper, our cities cannot survive. Higher yields in the agriculture sector are the only way to arrest inflation and to raise rural incomes. Constant increase in the purchasing power of our farmers is the only way to enlarge the domestic market and to increase industrial production of items of everyday use. Unfortunately those who are linking revenue collection with the distribution of resources are ignoring basic economic principles. Villages have survived for centuries without mega cities. Mega cities cannot survive for even a fortnight without villages.

Economic migration into the city from other provinces has given rise to the so-called Katchi Abadis. At present, more than half of Karachi’s citizens live in these slums. These people have had to migrate to Karachi and other parts of Sindh from other provinces since hardly any job opportunities have been created by the Federal Government or Provincial Governments of the other three provinces. Their recipe for survival of their working classes is for their workers to go abroad illegally by risking life and, if one lacks that kind of suicidal courage, one migrates to Sindh. It is not only in Karachi but the inundation of jobless workers is continuing all over Sindh. Something that has never been taken into account is the quantum of the flight of capital from Sindh on a daily basis and the effect on our wage structure and living conditions because of cheap labour coming from other provinces.

The population of Sindh has always been undercounted, resulting in reduced transfer of financial resources from the Divisible Pool. The Census of 2017 was also conducted on the de-jure principle, meaning that one shall be counted in the province from where he has migrated and not where he presently lives. The population of Karachi, as communicated to me by NADRA in 2013, stood at 21,347,871. After a passage of 4 years, the population of Karachi in the 2017 census was put at 16,051521 because economic migrants from other provinces, illegal migrants and others who did not have a NIC were not counted. This has happened all over Sindh, where Seraikis, Baluchs, Punjabis and Pakhtoons have been counted in the population of their original provinces and not in the population of Sindh.

Census is included in Part 2 of the Federal Legislative List and has to be supervised jointly by the Federation and the Province. In spite of many written and verbal protests of the Government of Sindh, the census exercise remained the exclusive domain of the Federal Government. While an enumerator or the army man accompanying him had access to the count of a household, the Chief Minister of Sindh was denied the information under the excuse of privacy of the household. When I took up the issue in the Senate of Pakistan and blocked the 24th Amendment which allowed the use of provisional census figures for Elections 2018, an agreement was signed by leaders of all political parties in the Senate to correct the figures by holding a recount on the de-facto principle in randomly sampled 5% population blocks. The implementation of this All Parties Agreement has yet to see the light of day while Sindh continues to suffer because of paucity of resources. This paucity has increased to alarming limits by the failure of the Federal Government to collect due taxes of the Federal Divisible Pool.

People from all over Pakistan are coming in while due resources are being withheld. Around sixty percent of patients in our government hospitals come from other provinces because of poor, inadequate and expensive medical services in the other three provinces and the Federal Capital and because in Sindh these are free of cost. Who would make his sick patient travel a thousand kilometers if medical facilities were available near home. With the patients necessarily come one or two caretakers. Most of the caretakers prefer to stay back and find a living in Sindh rather than remaining without work in their home towns.

In our policy planning meetings I have always emphasized that while it was important to demand justice for Sindh, we should stop expecting that we shall ever get justice even if we had a PPP Government in Islamabad. We have to accept the challenge of injustice and deprivation and formulate our strategies to modernize Sindh in the shortest possible time in spite of the constraints. We have to revolutionize our agriculture, invest in bio-saline agriculture as a major breakthrough, develop our natural resources, concentrate on clean and cheap renewable energy, revive closed industries and put up new ones, transform our slums, improve the road infrastructure, provide public transport, recycle our garbage and sewage, improve collection of provincial taxes, bypass the bureaucratic hurdles by involving the private sector and NGOs in the public-private partnership mode and develop Karachi and other urban centres of Sindh by creating a conducive environment for the growth of industry and trade. I am happy to note that some progress has been made on almost all these fronts. Notable among these are the Thar Coal and Power Projects, the combined cycle Nooriabad 100 MW power plant and the transmission line to run the Dhabeji pumping station, the wind power projects of the Jhampir wind corridor, RO plants for cleaning sea water at Hawkes Bay and Baba Bhit and about 60 other places and the work done on the TP 1 and TP 3 sewage treatment plants.

TP 1 and TP 3 sewage treatment plants are presently cleaning 130 MGD of sewage. A pilot RO plant has been put up at TP 1 and is using part of the output to produce clean drinking water. Various projects, including all the treatment plants have been placed under CPEC and will produce 390 MGD of drinking water for Karachi. Cleaned sewage being produced at TP 1 at present is not drinkable but is being used to meet the water requirements of some industries in SITE.

A slum transformation project to turn the Katchi Abadis into modern housing projects is now being worked upon by the Government of Sindh. The basic concept of this project is to build residential highrises by acquiring the valuable land of the Katchi Abadi dwellers at market prices. The apartments built at these housing complexes will be given to the original dwellers at much reduced prices after adjusting the prices of the land surrendered by them. The extra apartments built on the land will be sold at market prices. In my trips to China I have studied similar projects which provide decent living conditions to original dwellers of the slums and also earn substantial funds for the state. In China they have built most modern housing complexes on previous slums in partnership with real estate developers. We plan to develop and transform our existing slums on similar lines.

I have always opposed BRTs. For the cost of Green Line BRT in Karachi we could have purchased 1000 buses. Respected former Chief Minister Syed Qaim Ali Shah Sahib felt that we should accept the project since we shall get two extra traffic lanes and the cost was being paid by the Federal Government. The Federal Government has withheld its support and now the Provincial Government is forced to get the corridor completed at its own cost.

BRTs mean that there would be empty space of around two kilometers between two buses travelling on it. A lane along the footpath reserved for public transport of all kinds is the solution that has been so successfully adopted in modern cities. BRT structures are mere showpieces providing little relief to the commuters. We find that already the private sector has brought in modern coaches on the roads of Karachi which are providing good service. GoS has also announced that it will run a sizeable number of buses in private-public partnership. This is a proper mode which has already proved its efficacy in many hospitals and educational institutions in Sindh.

By and large, the resumption of the Karachi Circular Railway on modern lines promises to be a project that should look after the major commuting problems of the people of Sindh. This project has now been included in CPEC. Our record shows that we have completed another CPEC project, the Thar Coal project five months ahead of its completion time. I trust that work on the KCR, in spite of the hurdles raised by Pakistan Railways, will start shortly and the project will be completed ahead of its completion date.

The writer is a former senator and has shared his thoughts extensively on nuclear policy issues, left-wing ideas and literary and political philosophy. He can be reached at tajhaider1@gmail.com

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