Going circular again

Another attempt is to be made to revive the Karachi Circular Railway (KCR). Those with long memories will recall that between 1969 and 1999 Karachi had a circular railway and for many of those years it was popular. It carried a million passengers in its first year of operation. It became mired in corruption, there were rumours of ‘conspiracies’ within assorted transport mafias that wanted it shut down and the encroachers were quickly at work, with a recent figure of 7,650 structures on circular railway lands of which 4,653 are houses. A considerable challenge for those seeking to bring the line back to life.

Mass transport projects are the flavour of the decade and the green light was given to two such endeavours by the federal government on Wednesday 3^rd of May — Karachi and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa — with a combined value of Rs84.4 billion. In Peshawar it is to be buses and in Karachi trains and it is unlikely to be an easy ride. To no surprise the Chinese are to be involved in the construction and a ‘foreign lending agency’ is to provide inwards investment. In December 2016 the KCR was admitted to the stable of projects that make up the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

There is not a shred of doubt as to the necessity of a mass transit system, be it buses or railway or a combination of both — in Karachi. The city is strangling from its own economic success — and excess. It is congested, filthy in large part and the air quality is at times very poor. It is expanding laterally in all directions. A circular railway would go a long way towards easing at least some of the problems associated with getting people and goods from A-B; but in recent years there has been a lot of planning announced against very little activity on the ground, with encroachments being a major hurdle. If 43.2 kms of double railway track and 24 stations can be built, with 162 locomotives to run between them then so much the better — but seeing is believing, and thus far there is little to see.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 5^th, 2017.

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