Karachi — a filthy disgrace

There is no escaping the fact that Karachi has resisted every attempt to clean it up in the last five years, and as the federal government enters its waning days it is a blot on the escutcheon at both the federal and provincial levels. It was William Cobbett, he of Rural Rides fame who in the 1820s dubbed London ‘The Great Wen’. A ‘wen’ is a sebaceous cyst and Cobbett saw the expanding — and filthy — London as a pathological swelling on the face of the nation.

Karachi is its modern doppelganger as evidenced by the directions of the judicial commission which directed on January 5^th that the provincial chief secretary remove the current project director of the K-IV project along with other ‘delinquent’ officers who have fallen short in their duties. They were supposed to have provided improvements in supplies of potable drinking water and sanitation. There is no designated site for the disposal of medical waste. The incinerator installed at Civil Hospital Karachi is non-functional and residents opposed the building of an incinerator in Liaquatabad.

The commission expressed its displeasure at the director of the K-IV project failing to appear before it, and went on to note that 78 employees were posted to water treatment plants I and II had failed to show up for the last 14 months. They presumably continue to draw their pay. The catalogue of failure went on. Nobody was responsible or accountable and everybody had an excuse. Meanwhile, the city continues to have contaminated water supplies, solid waste piles up everywhere to be a breeding ground for all manner of diseases and hospital wastes feed the feral dogs. Other cities large and small are not so disgusting to look at and smell so why Karachi? Eventually, parts of the city will become unlivable, and the Great Wen that it has become is symbolic of the rot at the heart of the state, a home-grown pestilence that is the fault of nobody and everybody. No ‘hidden hand’ here Karachi did this to itself.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 27^th, 2018.

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