Missing five-year-old exposes city's death traps

Ovais's body was recovered on Wednesday from an open manhole in Mawach Goth

KARACHI: At around 11:30am on Monday, five-year-old Muhammad Ovais Ismail of Mawach Goth came back from school. After quickly devouring a meal cooked by his mother, Sughra, he rushed outside to play with his friends but never came back.

As it grew dark, the female members of his family became concerned and called the male members back home. The family and neighbours searched for the boy for hours, with no success.



Pictures were distributed. Rickshaws were driven through nearby villages - blaring the news of the missing boy - but there were no clues. The police were indifferent. Three days later, on Wednesday, Ovais's body was recovered from a manhole near his home.

His 23-year-old father, Muhammad Ismail, was inconsolable. He told The Express Tribune how he, along with his wife and two children, moved to Karachi from Larkana three months ago. Ismail pays rent of Rs2,000 per month for his two-room house and works at a rice repository on daily wage, which is not more than Rs300.

A hand fan, a charpoy and a small colourful bed sheet lie in one of the rooms. The white ceiling fan only moves when the wind blows. Clutching the bed sheet Ovais slept on nightly, Ismail recalled that on Wednesday morning people coming back from the mosque after Fajr prayers reported a severe stench coming from an open gutter. This is where he breaks down in tears.

His neighbour, Zulfiqar Ali, then continues the story, saying that when the people approached the manhole they saw human hands. "Edhi [rescue service] was immediately called in and the body was lifted [out]," he said.



Taking out the only picture of he has of his eldest child, Ismail says that he is an ordinary man. "I never had big dreams for myself, nor for my boy," he said. "I am a labourer, he would also have become one."

Not the first incident

According to Ali, this is not the first incident in Mawach Goth. Two months ago, a four-year-old girl also slipped inside a gutter and was taken out after two hours. "We cannot stop our children from playing outside all the time," he said, adding that they protest after their children's corpses are found in gutters but nothing happens.

Ismail demanded the government immediately put covers on the gutters. He blames the government for the death of his son.

The sight of huge, open overflowing gutters, flies buzzing over piles of garbage and two to three feet of stagnant sewage water accumulating on roads is common in the village.

At night when there is no electricity one can easily slip into gutters and open manholes, said Ali. "These are 13-feet deep, fatal manholes," he explained, gesturing towards the open gutters.

The blame game

There are four municipal agencies shifting the responsibility on each other. The district council administrator, Nadir Wasan, said they were responsible for the maintenance of peripheral areas of districts West and Malir.



For Mawach Goth, he said that the government had yet to issue a notification handing over the area to the district council. Until then, he said District Municipal Corporation (DMC) West or the public health department were responsible for the area.

Meanwhile, DMC West administrator Ashfaq Ahmed Mallah denied being responsible for the area. He said Mawach Goth was under Keamari Town and after the delimitation of Keamari to DMC South, it was handed over to the district council. "Now the public health department and the district council are the authorities responsible," he said.

The assistant engineer of the public health department, Rashid Ayub accepted that their job was to maintain the water supply and drainage system in Karachi's peripheral areas and rural Sindh and blamed the DMC, district council and the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board (KWSB) for the poor maintenance.

KWSB's recently transferred executive engineer of Baldia Town, Sajid Mohsin Qazi, said that Mawach Goth was never under their jurisdiction.

Amid this apparent denial of responsibility, activist Alamgir Khan had started a campaign by spraying the chief minister's face next to open manholes and piles of garbage. His attempt to shame the government into taking action failed as these death traps have yet to be covered up.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 14^th, 2016.