KCR revival!

The Sindh government's latest effort to revive the Karachi Circular Railway appears on course to hit another familiar roadblock, as anti-encroachment efforts are faced with the prospect of razing actual roads and whole houses, as the extent of the encroachments has reached comical levels. Aside from the majority of encroachments that have gotten so close to the line as to make it dangerous to move a train across, in some parts of the city, a person following the railway track would end up walking face-first into walls that have been built across the original line.

It was not always so. At its peak, KCR used to transport 6 million passengers per day along its 43km track. It was also profitable. Unfortunately, like all good things in this country, unscrupulous elements worked with uncanny synergy to bring it to its knees. In KCR's case, these included fare dodgers, corrupt management officials and shady private transport operators.

Today, after about 25 years of efforts to reoperationalise KCR - which was shut down in 1999 - efforts to clear encroachments generate mountains of bad press but achieve little. This is partly because some of the coverage misdirects rage at the government's failure to provide low-income housing to a place where the mostly poor residents of encroaching properties are blameless victims. The government's failure to govern may explain the encroachments, but it still does not justify the literal theft of public land and infrastructure. The one-sided victim narrative is unfair, balanced only by citizens' decision to punish politicians for their failure to address the housing crisis by repeatedly re-electing them.

The government needs to reanalyse not only whether KCR can be restored, but whether it can be made economically viable. From what is known, both of these seem to be uphill tasks. If this is the case, it would be better to cut our losses and focus on improving and expanding the bus network and road-based rapid transit. The loss of KCR would be unfortunate, but to keep wasting public money on a doomed project would be a tragedy.