KARACHI: I live in an affluent neighbourhood of Karachi. It has several consulates of European countries, a well-known school for girls and one of the city’s leading universities. All of these are a stone’s throw from my home. However, what is also a stone’s throw from my house is a ‘kachra kundi’, or a place where just about everybody in the neighbourhood throws his or her trash. It seems that no matter how educated or well-off one is in our society, nothing really gives them enough civic sense to realise that by throwing their home’s garbage outside their walls and onto a public space, they are spoiling everyone else’s living environment.
In a civilised society, what one would expect is a smoothly functioning solid waste collection system paid for by the taxes that people pay. This would mean that solid waste is collected from people’s homes — if this were done then there would be no need at all for people to throw their home waste anywhere. An alternative, which would perhaps be practical, given the state of municipal services in Karachi, could be that the KMC at least place a large dumpster in each locality so that the trash that is collected doesn’t create a mess. And from this dumpster, trash can be collected on, say, every other day.
That is the least that needs to be done, given that every month we pay the KMC for municipal services. The sad part is that we get nothing in return for this. And if this is the state of waste and garbage collection in what ostensibly is one of Karachi’s most affluent areas, one can only imagine what the situation is like in the low-income neighbourhoods.
Lalarukh Ejaz
Published in The Express Tribune, November 12th, 2012.
