Karachi sans master plan

COLONIAL masters created powerful allies by bestowing upon them large tracts of lands in various parts of the subcontinent in exchange for their unconditional loyalty and services in times of peace and war.

This elitist and unjust practice was later continued in Pakistan with much zeal and gusto, making it virtually a right for all those who had some influence over or stake in state affairs, though it's moot if the state receives loyalty and service, in real terms, from the recipients of state lands.

Historically, the greater chunks of precious lands have been awarded to powerful elites - politicians, civil and military bureaucrats, judges, journalists, capitalists, feudals, developers, etc - leaving little provision for the poor and landless. No wonder, then, that one fifth of our population has no proprietary rights or shelter, despite the fact that it's these people who have been loyally rendering services in all economic spheres - agriculture, industry, construction, transport, mining, fishing and so on. These landless masses have been disentitled from public lands only because they lack a political organisation or legislative representation to assert their fundamental rights against the interests of well-entrenched propertied classes and rent-seekers.

The most appalling effects of this elitist land policy are manifest in Karachi, a metropolis whose lands have become an odious object of rapacious scramble by corrupt politicians, corporate interests, powerful institutions, compromised administrators, collusive regulators and politico-ethnic mafias. Indeed, the city's plight presents a symbiotic nexus between the unjust enrichment of these powerful actors and the city's unchecked, unplanned and ungovernable expansion. It has become more robust in the wake of the state authorities' halfdone operation: retrieving the city from a violent meltdown, but leaving its fundamental structural, administrative and regulatory problems unfixed. The city continues to suffer from many a malaise:

Master plan: Perhaps nowhere in the world is a city expanding so quickly (horizontally, vertically and demographically) without a master plan. Karachi has none. The plan conceived during the Musharraf era and sanctioned by the Supreme Court never saw the light of day, mainly due to resistance by multiple jurisdictions, KMC, cantonments, Lyari and Malir development authorities, the Board of Revenue, etc. Each had its own conflicting land policy and implementation machinery. None wished to fall under one overarching authority to bring the disparate divisions into an orderly whole. As a result, administrative chaos persists.

Great chunks of public land have been awarded to the elites, leaving little provision for the poor.

Regulation: Notwithstanding Karachi's plethora of authorities and regulations, the city has been developed less in accordance with law and more in the interests of powerful developers. For instance, it is routine to see zonal regulations being 'softened' to convert large swathes of residential areas into commercial zones, disturbing and straining already scarce ecological resources.

In fact, hanging the zoning regulations/area standards has been the surest way of making billions of rupees. The beneficiaries are builders, politicians, bureaucrats and sometimes even criminal facilitators, but the cost of tampering with the physical capacity, zonal density and urban aesthetics is paid heavily by the city - a 'living' organism - when it loses its natural habitat for breathing, living and growing.