Dirty, dangerous and unsafe

To be sure Karachi has its defenders, many of them resident for generations, and they extol its virtues at every opportunity, usually citing a misty-eyed past that refers to a time when there were bikinis on French Beach, the power was on most of the time, crime was low and there was a kind of shabby gentility. It was the City of Lights — though this was always a myth — but the spirit of self-delusion runs deep in Karachiites and no opportunity to deny reality is missed. That reality is evident to anybody with working eyes, ears and nose and the research and analysis division of the Economist Group has now ranked Karachi as among the least safe of 60 major cities globally in a report issued in the last week.

The Safe Cities Index has four categories — digital, health, infrastructure and physical — and Karachi comes in last. The city scored poorly across all categories but was brought to the bottom by the extremely low levels of personal security, including the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks. It is one of the ‘least livable’ cities in the world, ranked at 134 out of 140.

The Economist is not making this up in an idle moment. Large parts of the city are foetid wastelands, there is the reek of human waste, dead animals are a common sight rotting at roadsides, sewers and drains of all kinds regularly back up and even a light shower of rain can see underpasses flooded. It is strewn with unfinished infrastructure projects, and attempts to get a mass-transit system up and running have repeatedly fallen flat. Successive city governments have promised to address the worst of the innumerable blights, and all have failed thus far, sometimes not getting beyond the back-of-an-envelope stage of planning. This festering wen is the fault and responsibility of everybody and nobody. Unregulated lateral expansion continues apace. Mafias control the land and property markets. It remains loved by millions though. There are none so blind as will not see.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 15^th, 2017.

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