Impasse: Banks, petrol stations refuse city govt staff

Nearly 80,000 city workers are waiting for the right orders.

KARACHI:

The city’s garbage lifters and ambulances found themselves stuck on Monday after banks and petrol and CNG contractor firms refused to allow any transactions to go through.

“The fate of the CDGK and other local bodies is defined along legal lines of the new ordinance because in legal matters, even a comma or a semi-colon is of pivotal importance, which no layman can understand but the legal experts can,” said Masood Alam, by now the “former” executive district officer for municipal services.

Since the day’s start on Monday, the town municipal administrations waited in vain for official instructions and notification to emerge from the government.

Unless some clarity emerges, nearly 80,000 staff members of the city district government, town municipal administrations and union councils will have no place to go.

On Monday evening, newly appointed Karachi Commissioner Muhammad Hussein Syed visited the terror-stricken Qasba Colony and Katti Pahari. The commissioner had previously presided over a meeting of the former administrators of the TMAs.

They had discussed sanitation and arrangements ahead of expected monsoon showers and Shab-e Barat.

During the meeting, the former administrators of the TMA and the EDOs were referred to as municipal officers, and the commissioner told them that the municipal departments should cooperate to keep the city clean. But there has been no official notification of a change in job titles.



Published in The Express Tribune, July 12^th, 2011.