Karachi
In interaction with the police, organisations like the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and other NGOs have no executive powers.
This was stated by Samir Hoodbhoy, former chairman of Shehri-CBE, highlighting the snags in the functioning of the local governments in providing relief to the citizens and solving their problems, at a seminar on Saturday evening.
The seminar, titled “Defining a good (local) governance agenda for Karachi”, was held under the aegis of Shehri-CBE (Citizens for a better environment) at a hotel.
The local government, he said, was there to provide for the necessities of the masses within a limited scope and encompassed things like water supply, health, street lights and roads.
Hoodbhoy listed land use in Karachi as another snag. He said that in 2009, a change was brought about in the land law and commercialisation.“Right now just one man controls laws for 20 million heads of the population,” he said.
He said that to commercialise 1,000 square yards, it called for six million rupees. There was no planning, he said, adding that everything was ad hoc and random. He cited Khalid Bin Walid Road as an example of this destruction.
He said that in 2009, Mustafa Kamal converted an amenity plot in Mehmoodabad into a housing locality. He lamented that there was no audit from 2001 to 2011, even though lots of money had come in during the Musharraf era.
“Where did all this money go?” he queried. He said there were leakages and corruption in other countries too but then there were iron-jacketed checks and balances.
In Karachi, it was a scramble for the resources, he said. Officials had to be accessible to the citizenry, he added.
Stressing the basic right of the citizens to know, Hoodbhoy said that every citizen had the right to ask of his government details of the local budget, the heads of expenditure and the tax receipts.
A noted town planner and member of Shehri, Farhan Anwar, said Karachi was not a city that had not been planned for, but, unfortunately, the plans had never seen the light of the day.
In this context, he cited the Greater Karachi Plan (1952), the Greater Karachi Resettlement Plan (1958), the Karachi Development Plan (1974-85), the Karachi Development Plan (2020) and the and Karachi Strategic Development Plan (2020). However, he regretted that the implementation authority had never had the requisite powers.
He said the implications of the SLGO, 1979, were: limited jurisdiction over land; lack of institutional framework of physical planning; and lack of control over critical civic services.
The local government, he said, had never been empowered to fulfil the people’s mandate.
Jamaat-e-Islami councillor Muhammad Junaid Mukati lamented that no government had ever held local bodies’ elections. The last one, he said, was held at the prodding of the Supreme Court.
“Our problem is that our MNAs and MPAs manage to have themselves elected but they just don’t know what they are supposed to do.
“Ninety percent of the crime in our society are there because of lack of justice or delayed justice. But our MNAs and MPAs are least concerned. Our exports are plummeting but what have our elected representatives done to stall the trend? Have we ever realised the fate of our textile workers if it dies, which it is right now?”
Muhammad Adnan from UC-21, District East, and an MQM member, called for raising awareness among the masses, especially children on civic issues, and said that it was “none but us to blame when we dump our garbage right in our streets or in front of our houses”.
He said awareness programmes to that effect should be undertaken in schools.
Syed Farhan Ali, from UC-25, said that they had been elected councillors but were deprived of the requisite powers. Another speaker lamented that K-Electric was replacing copper wires with silver ones, and that was causing frequent breakdowns and voltage fluctuations, which, in turn, were damaging electrical appliances.
Winding up, Engineer Nooruddin Ahmed of Shehri denounced the class-oriented education system and said that it was this system whereby the rich paid to have their offspring educated in elite schools that caused the country’s civic problems. Ending the seminar on a positive note, he said that “we mustn’t just give up in weak resignation. There’s light at the end of the tunnel and if all of us make sincere efforts we can overcome all the problems we are facing right now”.
The seminar was followed by a group discussion whereby all participants came up with suggestions.
