Mayor asks CM to transfer six civic agencies to KMC

Karachi Mayor Wasim Akhtar has asked Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah to transfer six civic agencies and services to the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation.

In a letter to the CM, Akhtar said the Solid Waste Management, the Karachi Water & Sewerage Board, the Building Control Authority, the Karachi Development Authority, the Master Plan Development & Town Planning, and the Urban Transport & Mass Transit should be handed over to the KMC due to their essentially municipal nature.

The mayor said his demand was in exercise of the powers conferred to the government by Section 74(b) of the Sindh Local Government Act 2013 as it ensured transfer of functions from the council to the government and vice versa. “Notwithstanding anything contained in any other law for the time being in force, the government may transfer the management and control of any institution or service maintained by government to a council,” he quoted the section while requesting the CM to approve the proposed transfer.

The mayor said Karachi was the financial capital of the country and the seventh largest megapolis of the world. “But it is unfortunately deprived of essential municipal functions such as urban planning, including housing and town planning, regulation of land use and construction of buildings, water supply and sanitation, conservancy and solid waste management, and the urban transport and the mass transit programmes, which are essentially municipal and remained part of the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation.”

He said Karachi was ethnically and demographically was the most diverse city of the country and due to its political alignment it was not duly represented in the federal and the provincial governments. “This situation is likely to remain so in future, the only opportunity for inhabitant of Karachi to articulate their aspirations is available at local levels, and if the local level is not properly empowered the sense of deprivation will further increase.”

He said the constitutional development from encouragement of the local government institutions (Article 32) to a constitutional duty (Article 140A) to establish the local government systems was a marked departure from the past. “The creation of the local governments based on the constitutional directive to devolve political, administrative and financial responsibility and authority to the elected representatives of the local government is a giant leap forward. Article 140A does not envision the local government to be a nominal or residual or merely symbolic anymore but a real empowered stakeholder and a breeding ground for deeper and more public responsive politics.”