Talpur Road food street remains a pipe dream
Shopkeepers and vendors have begun parking their vehicles and pushcarts under the steel structure meant to house food ki-osks at Karachi’s first planned food street. PHOTO: EXPRESS
Mir Karam Ali Khan Talpur Road, located in the midst of Saddar’s busiest commercial zones, has remained closed to traffic for the last several years.
Access to the road was first curbed in 2016 when the Sindh government expressed its will to turn the road into a food street. However, despite the passing of six years, no food street could be set up in the area, leaving the roadway permanently closed to vehicles and littered with purposeless iron sheds hinting at nothing but arrested development.
While developmental work on Talpur Road food street is still a work in progress with no set timeline for completion, the provincial government had also announced a secondary scheme for the beautification and restoration of the road, which is also still going on.
This includes planting coconut trees between the iron sheds and the addition of large pots of flowering plants on either side of the road. Despite grand plans, however, the stretch of street is neither beautiful nor usable at this point.
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Owing to lack of supervision, the road space is largely taken up by parked cars and motorbikes or littered with dozens of fruit and vegetable stalls at any given moment. The prolonged closure of Mir Karam Ali Khan Talpur Road has severely affected the flow of traffic in the greater Saddar area, while it also impacts businesses on both sides of the road.
Per Saddar Traders Association leader Dilawar Khan Awan, there are 150 shops on the sides of Talpur Road while there are about 500 shops in the plazas or commercial centres facing the road. “The closure of the road has severely affected all these businesses. Before its closure, the road had bus stops of 20 to 22 routes which implied access to thousands of shoppers on a daily basis from which the markets located on both sides used to make a lot of business.
Closing this road to traffic has cost shopkeepers hundreds of millions in lost revenue,” informed Awan, adding that the affected shopkeepers have been protesting against the indefinite restoration work of the road and have also filed a petition in Sindh High Court.
Addressing the state of traffic in the area, Abdul Haseeb, who is a resident of Saddar, said that the closure of Talpur Road has led to an increase in traffic jams in Saddar’s densely populated business areas. “This area had always been hard to navigate, but the closure of Talpur Road has made the traffic situation a lot worse in surrounding business areas,” he commented.
Akhtar Baloch, a local researcher and author of several books on Karachi, while talking to The Express Tribune, said that ongoing construction work on the said road has negatively impacted Saddar’s visual aesthetic.
“Right in front of this road is the century-old Empress Market which is of immense significance for Saddar and gives the commercial area its historical status.
The construction of large iron sheds on this road has affected the beauty of Empress Market, he said, lamenting that Empress Market used to be seen from afar while passing through Lucky Star Road, but now the commercial centre cannot be seen even up close,” he lamented.
Commenting in this regard, Provincial Minister for Local Government Syed Nasir Hussain Shah shared that the developmental works in Saddar are being carried out under the plan of restoration and beautification project of the old city area. “Every effort will be made to ensure that no one is harmed from the development work,” he told The Express Tribune.