KARACHI: The year 2019 nearing its end and the decade coming to a close, Karachi is still generating 70% of the country’s revenue. but the city of lights remains deprived of basic facilities itself.
Being the industrial hub and an airport city, Karachi generates billions of rupees in taxes which are used to run the economy of the country. Yet the city has been plagued with several problems, most of which have remained unresolved for the past 10 years because of the partial policies of the federal and provincial governments.
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Over the decade, quite a few political and legal transformations have taken place in the city. The gap between the rural and urban areas, for instance, has widened with the extension of the quota system which has not only contributed to unemployment but has also created a sense of deprivation among young Karachites.
The city is littered with heaps of garbage, has a scarcity of public transportation, broken roads, severe water crisis, appalling sewerage system and the weakest local-bodies system as compared to the rest of the country.
Different democratic governments that came to power neither employed structured and independent methods for the prosperity of the city nor made enough efforts to resolve the issues.
To top it all off, the city’s actual population was misrepresented in the federal government’s census of 2017, according to which the population of Karachi was cited as 16 million, with the urban population standing at 15 million and the rural population at one million. Per independent sources, however, the population of Karachi is over 25 million.
Under the Sindh Local Government Act 2013, the democratically-elected provincial government scrapped the authorities awarded to the local bodies institutions during the British era.
It is a setback that Sindh has been under the rule of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) is in power in the center while the Muhattida Qaumi Movement (MQM), is the biggest party in local bodies institutions.
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Despite being rival parties, PTI and MQM together represent the opposition seat in the Sindh assembly. Owing to their lack of majority, both parties fail to make legal amendments to empower municipal institutions.
There is a divide between the political and administrative institutions in Karachi, hence development works do not take place under one umbrella.
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