Mass Transit Projects of Karachi Grind to a Halt
The Sindh government announced that the metro bus would soon be operative in Karachi carrying some 3.5 million passengers daily
The plans announced several times by the Sindh government to improvise the transportation system of Karachi including the Orange Line project, Red Line, Yellow Line, and Blue Line have not been materialized even after many years.
The Sindh government announced that the metro bus would soon be operative in Karachi carrying some 3.5 million passengers daily.
Failure to fulfill these promises, the citizens have expressed their concerns multiple times but no progressive response has come from the authorities.
Some of the projects in Karachi including the Orange Line, Red Line, Yellow Line, and Blue Line were assigned to the Sindh government to be completed within two years.
Unfortunately, the task couldn’t be completed even after five years.
Moreover, the federal government took the responsibility to complete green line project and hand it over to the province but despite the route is completed, it has not been launched so far.
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Orange line project
The provincial government was also supposed to construct the first Orange Line in Karachi.
Being the smallest project, the government was not able to build four-kilometer route even after five years.
Redline project
Similar to the Orange Line project, the Red Line project couldn’t be started even after a loan from Asian Development Bank (ADB) was approved.
The 26-kilometer long route would have to start from Model Colony and end at Numaish Chowrangi.
Yellow line and blue line
Two more 26-kilometer long routes, Yellow Line and Blue Line projects, were to be constructed by the Sindh government but they also join the list of untouched projects.
When will the Green Line project start?
After two years of announcement by the federal government, the green line project was initiated in 2016 with an expected time to be completed by 2018.
However, the reality is the opposite as the deadline for completion of this project kept extending.
The new completion date for the project is now set for June 2021 for which the federal government has taken the responsibility of building infrastructure and providing buses for operations.
According to sources, green buses will be delivered to Karachi soon.
The project was initially estimated at Rs 16 billion, which has now crossed Rs 20 billion.
The federation says that all obstacles in the completion of the project have been removed and buses will be able to run in August.
The position of the provincial government
Addressing a press conference, the Sindh government has repeatedly announced to gift Karachi a better and modernized transportation system but it seemed to be non-serious in completing the projects.
In this regard, the Provincial Transport Minister Owais Shah has said many times that the projects will be completed soon.
He then said that the project has been postponed due to lack of funds from the federation.
Awais Shah said, “The Orange Line project will be completed soon and other projects will be started. The work on the Orange Line project will be completed by the end of this year or next year”.
In Ramazan 2019, the provincial transport minister claimed to have brought 1,000 new buses to Karachi to be operated on 40 different routes.
Out of 1,000 news buses, 60 buses were promised in two months and then 200 buses in the next two months.
