When your source of income goes up in flames

KARACHI:

Transporter Taj Muhammad Afridi and his family of 15 were living a happy life when he owned three coaches that plied between Surjani Town and Clifton. The family’s source of income took a hit when two of these coaches were torched on January 8, in a wave of violence in New Karachi.

“I was at the airport and had just returned after performing Umra when I learned that two of my buses have been torched,” said 52-year-old Afridi, who has been associated with the public transport business since 1976.



Afridi and his sons rushed to UP Morr and Saleem Centre to receive the remains of their vehicles. “Both the vehicles were completely burnt and I had to give the police Rs10,000 to get hold of the buses.” Afridi had bought the coaches on instalments for Rs2 million but ended up selling them for Rs170,000 for scrap value.

“Even the people whom I bought the vehicles from also suffered losses as I owed them a few instalments,” he said, complaining that coaches and minibuses have no insurance system and they never receive compensation from the government.

“My family was completely dependent on those vehicles and we were living a happy life despite the CNG crisis,” Afridi recalled. The family can hardly make ends meet with only one vehicle now. It is not only the family of the vehicle owner that is affected when people torch them. “You snatch food from the children of the drivers, the conductors, the mechanics, and bus-stop supervisors who all depend on these vehicles,” said Syed Mehmood Afridi, the general secretary of the Karachi Transport Ittehad (KTI). The association has around 8,000 vehicles running on the roads and a total of 700 coaches and minibuses were torched in the past seven to eight years. “We take off our vehicles from the roads when we feel any danger,” said Mehmood, adding that 2013 saw fewer violent protests than 2012.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 18^th, 2014.