More tanker troubles

Whichever way one turns the oil products transport industry in Pakistan is in trouble. It is not so much in trouble financially as tanker-running is still a profitable business, but it is in deep trouble with a range of regulatory and industry or governmental bodies. The latest difficulty concerns the vast and unofficial tanker park that blights Shireen Jinnah Colony in Karachi and has done for decades. In an effort to resolve the tanker-parking problem a new tanker terminal has been built with the expectation that it would receive the tankers and decant them from residential areas.

It now appears that the companies have resisted the move, and done so many times in defiance of any number of court orders. Now the Supreme Court has directed the provincial government, the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) and other concerned stakeholders to get the new terminal operational within a week and the streets around Shireen Jinnah Colony to be cleared.

At the bottom of the problem is the unwillingness of the tanker operators to pay their share of the cost of operationalising the terminal. Bringing it online in a week as per the Supreme Court ruling would appear to be close to wishful thinking given the obduracy of the tanker companies, to say nothing of the uncertainty connected to exactly what the Supreme Court could do if its orders are ignored. Aerial images of the closely packed tankers suggest that clearing them by main force would be an extremely difficult operation, attended by considerable risk to life and limb given the volatile nature of the liquids they are loaded with. Whether the police have the capacity to enforce the SC ruling is doubtful in the extreme and paramilitary interventions equally doubtful. The tanker operators have hamstrung the judiciary and rendered law-enforcement agencies impotent. They have exposed the Sindh government as an irrelevance — not particularly difficult considering its impotence across a range of issues — and the residents of Shireen Jinnah Colony face an unending blight on their lives. Where does real power lie in Sindh? Certainly not in the hands of its elected government.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 8^th, 2017.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.