TALKING about a revival of the Karachi Circular Railway is a bad joke. On Monday, for the umpteenth time, we were given a timetable about when a study regarding the circular railway would be ready. The Japanese told Sindh’s chief secretary the report would be completed by November. We have been here before. The Japanese — like many other foreign donors — are serious. Their offer to rebuild the KCR has been there for a long time. If there is no progress and the KCR track remains buried under tonnes of rock and sand, it is the Pakistani bureaucracy and the federal and provincial governments which must accept the blame. A revived KCR must still be welcomed, even though it will be a poor substitute for the mass transit scheme which has existed on paper since the seventies, when a plan was drawn up for a five-and-a-half mile underground “spine” track from Liaquatabad to Tower. The military government, which seized power in 1977, shelved it. The Junejo government revived it, and an Indus Mass Transit Company came into being, providing for elevated railway tracks in phases. Money was pledged by a number of foreign agencies, and even the cornerstone was laid by a prime minister. But the plan never saw the light of day.

The ‘soft loan’ offer by the Japan International Cooperation Agency is magnanimous — $1.58bn in easy instalments spread over 40 years. What, then, is officialdom waiting for? It is waiting, because that is what it does. The failure to see the mass transit scheme get going and years of dithering over the KCR have reduced public transport projects for Karachi to an academic discourse. More regrettably, there is lack of governmental will, for the political leadership has not put its foot down and pressured the bureaucracy into expediting any of these projects.