A dusty fix: Residents of Keamari, Shireen Jinnah start campaign against coal transporters

A meeting will be held today to decide on a course of action.

KARACHI: For the last couple of weeks, the residents of Keamari and Shireen Jinnah Colony have been quite busy.

They have been working together and have started a campaign against the transportation of coal from the Karachi Port Trust (KPT) to upcountry areas. The residents believe that the way coal is transported is seriously hazardous to their health. To make sure they get their point across, they have put up banners and wall chalking in Jackson Bazaar and other areas of the neighbourhood.

"Oxygen is the only thing in this country that is free," said Ashfaq Qureshi, the general secretary of the alIslah Mashra Welfare Trust, a local area committee. "My wife and daughter have been suffering from eye infections frequently as the coal dust blows into our house every time they load the trucks."



Qureshi, a portly man, was talking to the residents of the area and other members of the committee at the Qurtaba Masjid in Shireen Jinnah Colony. These men met a week ago for 30 minutes after Isha, where they were trying to come up with a plan to put pressure on the KPT to take measures to stop the pollution caused by taking the coal from one place to another.

While talking to The Express Tribune, Qureshi said that they had taken the matter to the Sindh High Court, adding that they will be holding protests outside Karachi Press Club. Qureshi said they had written to the KPT, Karachi Metropolitan Corporation and the Sindh Environmental Protection Agency regarding the problems they were facing because of the tons of coal being kept in an open area next to their homes. So far, he said, no one had responded. He asked the committee to wait till the next hearing at court - which was supposed to take place on Wednesday. The court, however, changed the date of the hearing to December 4. The committee will now have another meeting today and will decide on what to do then.

Muhammad Arshad, a resident who was also at the meeting, advised the committee's chairperson, Maulana Mattiur Rehman, to gather residents and block the road used by the coal transporters.

"More than a hundred trucks leave the coal terminal in Shireen Jinnah Colony and barely any of them cover the coal," he said. "The coal's dust and powder keeps falling out and causes more air pollution. The only way to solve this problem is to relocate the yard."

KPT responds

The port trust's PRO, Shafiq Faridi, said that they cannot stop handling the coal because of protests. "We have to look at the whole country not just a few people," he said, talking to The Express Tribune. "Coal is an essential commodity and is used to generate power. In Pakistan it is imported and brought to the KPT, from where it is dispatched to the rest of the country."

He added that they were addressing the residents' issues and will try to minimise the pollution by covering the truck and sprinkling water on the piles of coal in the yard. He claimed that they had constructed a wall and had also planted trees along the Groyne yard - the KPT yard where it keeps the coal.

According to Faridi, they handled coal the same way it was done all over the world - it was stored in the open and could not be transported in containers or any other form of packaging. He said that the Groyne yard had a capacity of storing around 700,000 tons of coal and usually kept a maximum of 500,000 tons at all times.

KPT transports the coal from the vessels to the Groyne yard via trucks to store it while the trailers carry the coal upcountry. Faridi claimed that the KPT was constructing two coal handling berths at the deep water container port where the coal will be transferred directly to the yard through a conveyor belt.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 29^th, 2014.