Insufficient funds: ‘KMC given only Rs500m over four years to clean nullahs’

Karachi Mayor Wasim Akhtar has said that only Rs500 million has been issued to the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) to clean drains in the last four years, and details of the funds' expenditures have already been given to the Sindh government.

In a statement issued on Tuesday, Akhtar maintained that the funds for cleaning drains were not released to the KMC every, while they continued to brim with trash.

"There are 500 small drains under the administrative control of district municipal corporation and [enough] funds have not been issued to clean them," he said.

The mayor stated that drains in the metropolis had not been desilted since 2018, when Rs500 million was issued to the KMC on the directives of the Supreme Court.

"Supreme Court had passed a similar directive in 2017 and the KMC had given an estimate of Rs1.12 billion to the court for cleaning nullahs," he said. "The court had then asked the provincial government to release the amount, but it only issued Rs500 million."

He claimed that the tenders were issued and he had personally overviewed the cleanliness campaign then, adding that the Sindh government still owed Rs720 million to the KMC.

Akhtar added that following the issuance of urban flooding warning by the National Disaster Management Authority, he had held a press conference to inform the relevant authorities that the KMC did not have enough funds to de-silt the rainwater drains and wrote letters to the Sindh chief minister (CM), but the provincial government did not pay any heed.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 29^th, 2020.