Turning a blind eye

KMC has yet to take proactive action against illegal charged parking in the city

KARACHI:

The Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) makes a lot of decisions. Most of the time, however, it ends up making a mockery of its own decisions.

An example of this is the action against the city's illegal charged parking mafia. Every few months, the authorities jolt out of their slumber to clamp down on illegal parking across the city. Barely a few days after the raids, the mafia can be seen back in business throughout the city.



Right under the nose of KMC's charged parking office at Civic Centre, the parking mafia, wearing the KMC's uniform, is looting citizens, allegedly with the support of KMC's charged parking department and the Karachi traffic police.

Contrary to what the KMC's charged parking director Mehmood Hassan told The Express Tribune about the single-lane official parking, costing Rs20 for cars and Rs5 for bikes, right outside his office building a charged parking collector, wearing a KMC uniform, charges Rs50 for cars and Rs20 for bikes, allowing up to four lanes of parking, completely clogging traffic during rush hours. Hassan insisted that more than one-lane parking on any road was illegal and anyone charging above the official rates was charging exorbitantly.

A man collecting parking charges at Civic Centre told The Express Tribune that he gives Rs1,000 as bribe to two traffic police sections - Aziz Bhatti traffic police section and New Town traffic police section - every day. He revealed that the entire KMC charged parking department is involved in this corruption.



Meanwhile, the section officer of the Aziz Bhatti traffic police section, Hashim, refuted the allegation and responded that he has only recently been provided with a lifter to lift illegally parked cars. "How could we have removed such a high number of illegally parked vehicles without a lifter?" he questioned, giving assurances that they would soon take action against the illegal parking at Civic Centre.

He said that he has a comparatively small police force to monitor traffic and, due to the prevailing law and order situation, it is not easy for them to tackle the situation.

On the other hand, the section officer of the New Town traffic police section, Shaukat Awan, refused to comment.



KMC's additional director of charged parking, Javed Jadoon, presenting his own logic and negating all rules of parking, said that sometimes Civic Centre got full of parked vehicles, so people started parking outside in two or three lanes.

He reasoned that the people managing the charged parking also provided security and cleaned the cars free of cost. However, he gave assurances that, within a day, illegal parking would be removed from the area surrounding Civic Centre, which also turned out to be a mere assurance.

Meanwhile, Gulshan-e-Iqbal assistant commissioner Shoukat Ali Ujjan cried over his lack of power. He said that not only around Civic Centre, the whole of Gulshan was facing the parking problem.



"But the power lies with the KMC and the District Municipal Corporation," he said, adding that these two municipalities have the machinery as well as the manpower to tackle the problem. "We are just a vigilance body, who can only point out," he lamented.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 6^th, 2015.