KARACHI. The locals of Karachi are the ones who have to face numerous challenges along with a poor transport system and a rotten infrastructure.
The US-based magazine Bloomberg has termed the transport system of the city ‘worst in the world’. The metropolis that contributes more than 70 percent of the country’s tax revenue has been mired into politics and left like a political orphan.
As per a rough estimate, around 42 percent of commuters in the megacity rely on public transport.
MA Jinnah Road, which connects central Karachi to the port, constantly faces severe traffic jams.
But to their chagrin, they have no option than to travel on decades-old, overcrowded buses that use the roof as a second deck for passengers at times.
The main thoroughfares in Karachi have dilapidated over time while most of the traffic signals have stopped working.
The former mayor of Karachi, Waseem Akhtar, remained in power for four years but decried not having powers.
Most of Karachi’s administrative control resides with the Sindh government which has failed to uplift the transport system of the city let alone be infrastructure.
The federal government had announced a package of Rs 162 billion years earlier to modernize the city but according to the local government, it was never credit to its accounts.
Although the federal government of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), which won the highest number of seats from Karachi announced a package valued at Rs 1.1 trillion to give the city a makeover couple of months ago, However, no significant progress has been made in this regard yet.
Even the posh localities of the megacity rely on the tanker mafia to get their underground water tanks filled.
Karachi was once well-connected by a circular railway but corruption and mismanagement in the transportation sector brought the city to a grinding halt in the 1990s.
The city was supposed to get a circular railway nearly 15 years ago but it could not be initiated due to encroachment on the earlier existed railway tracks.
The delays in development projects are “hardly an anomaly”, citing the 15-year-old discussion to revive the circular railway, the Green Line bus project announced six years ago, and the Blue Line bus project, which was shelved in 2019 by the Sindh government due to financial issues.
The Supreme Court (SC) ordered the restoration of the circular system but it is still under process and there is no idea how long would it take.
Read more: The Plight of Karachi Roads and Story of Failure and Incompetence
Sindh Transport Minister Owais Shah entered an agreement with Daewoo Bus Service in 2019 to bring 200 buses on the roads within two months. However, it never happened.
The minister blamed the federal government for buses not being injected in the system but the company blamed the ambiguous condition of the economy and maintained that investment was a risk.
Karachi Transport Ittehad President Irshad Bukhari said that there should be at least 40,000 buses commensurating population but there were hardly 7,000 buses currently plying on the roads of Karachi.
He reiterated that Karachi is being treated like a stepchild and there exists no such thing as administration.