After every rain outpour, the city experiences prolonged power outages, roads get flooded and water collects knee-deep that typically lasts for several weeks. Stagnant rainwater, uncollected garbage, and disgorging open manholes have turned Karachi into the world's largest sewerage network. People regularly die in Karachi from electrocution by simply touching a pole or receiving electric shocks from the rain accumulated water. Every time it rains, the city’s traffic slows down, increases the risk of accidents, and takes residents more than an hour by car to travel less than two miles.  

 

This deplorable condition has been going on for decades. Political parties (in particular PPP and MQM) and modern industrialists have pillaged the city in inconceivable ways, grabbed land, generated illegal profits, evaded taxes, and defended their vested interests. Karachi is an irrationally decentralized city with a hodgepodge of overlapping administrative authorities. The decentralization is not accidental, it is easier to manipulate and rob a fragmented city. While corruption penetrates deeper into the soul of Karachi, there’s a certain misguided segment of our intelligentsia that is quick to come at the defense of corruption and attempts to manufacture the opinion that an anti-corruption stance is, in fact, another form of populism. 

 

The patriotic duty to defend the city and the spirit to build a metropolis is entirely missing from dominant political parties, the intelligentsia, and the capitalist class in Sindh. Certain people are influencing the nation in a manner that draws the people into passivity in the face of every catastrophe and leaves them no energy for action. 

 

While Karachi’s population grows exponentially, the infrastructure has remained stagnant. This gap between population growth and infrastructure development will continue to grow as long as Karachi is starved of the wealth it generates. We all know that only a tiny fraction of tax collected from Karachi is reinvested back into its infrastructure. 

 

The freedom-loving people of Karachi have been subjected to perverse conditions but they continue to prevail. Karachi continues to go through hell but refuses to die, it’s a resilient city. The recent heavy monsoon rains have exposed that Sindh is failing and has certainly heightened our sense of urgency to act and build a great metropolis. The citizens of Pakistan are revitalized by their historic duties and national aspirations to transform Karachi into the city it has always meant to be. We will be triumphant in this endeavor. 

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Solving the Storm Water Problem 

 

High-level approach: The fact that our systems are underdeveloped is an opportunity to push towards green infrastructure and reduce gray infrastructure.

 

• Gray infrastructure relies on hard infrastructures — such as storm drains, concrete, and pipes — to collect and channel stormwater into waterways. To reduce street flooding by channeling rainwater run-off to fixed capacity drains is not effective because as the city expands and non-porous surface increases, the amount of water the pipes must handle also increases, which always runs the risk of overwhelming the pipes and of a subsequent flooding

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• Green infrastructures include vegetated rooftops, roadside plantings, absorbent gardens, and other measures that capture, filter and reduce stormwater. Green infrastructures allow cities to become sponges and prevent the water from ever reaching the drain.  

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