Infrastructure decay accumulates

Infrastructure of Pakistan, the physical veins and arteries that keep people and the economy moving, is old & decaying

The infrastructure of Pakistan, the physical veins and arteries that keep people and the economy moving, is old and decaying. Parts of the infrastructure — many roads, virtually all of the railways and the canal system — predate Partition in places by as much as a century. Even the newer sections, such as the Lahore-Islamabad motorway, are now almost a quarter-century old and in need of refurbishment. The roads of Islamabad have barely changed in terms of their carrying capacity since they were laid. There are 300,000 cars a day coming into the city and the traffic police say that the roads are insufficient to cope with the load. Pedestrian infrastructure in the city has been virtually ignored and increasing numbers are killed or injured trying to cross fast-moving streams of traffic. Canals everywhere are failing, the latest being the Rohri at Sukkur which has seen a reduction in flow of 70 per cent caused by the collapse of the right and left flank walls of the Phull Fall Regulator. Cracks had first appeared two years ago, but had not been repaired despite the pleas of farmers and local people whose crops and drinking water supplies were obviously going to be affected by any failure. Hundreds of railway bridges across the entire system were, in the last year, assessed to be at or beyond their safe life — accidents waiting to happen.

On a more positive note, two strategically important $10 billion dollar projects for an upgrade of railway links associated with the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor have been agreed in principle — but are years away from fruition. Gas pipeline infrastructure is also ageing — and vulnerable to attack as is so often the case in Balochistan, and the failure to maintain and develop the national system of dams has progressively enfeebled the economy at every level. It is all very well building grand metro projects in large conurbations, but if that is at the expense of caring for the subsidiary infrastructure that feeds into the macro, then they are going to be the problems of the future not the solutions of today. Fixable? Just — but in need of urgent national action.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 11^th, 2016.

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