Villagers berate Sindh govt for not altering Malir Expressway’s route

A large number of residents of various villages of Malir marched from the Pakistan Hotel to Memon Goth on Friday to express their anger at the Sindh government for not altering the route of the Malir Expressway project, arguing that it would demolish the oldest villages of the area, displace a large number of people and destroy cultivation.

Participants of the march, which was organised by the Malir Action Committee, said that in the name of development projects in Malir, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) leadership had been converting the indigenous people of the area into a minority and displacing thousands of them after demolishing their villages.

Speakers at the march included Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Malir Rural President Dr Masroor Sial, Pakistan Khaskheli Ittehad’s Yaqoob Khaskheli, and committee members Haji Abdul Aziz Baloch, Azeem Dehqan and Hanif Dilmurad.

They lamented that despite the announcement of Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah of altering the Malir Expressway’s route to allay concerns of the local population, development work was being carried out on the project’s old route, which meant that the residents of Malir had been deceived by the PPP.

In last December, PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari had performed the groundbreaking of the expressway project, terming it the biggest civic infrastructure project ever carried out by any provincial government in Pakistan under the public-private partnership.

The project is to be built as an access-controlled 38.5-kilometre-long high-speed toll expressway to connect Karachi’s centre to the M-9, a motorway between Karachi and Hyderabad.

However, residents of more than two dozen old villages fear that the expressway’s construction would displace thousands of them.