Those who have the interests of this city at heart, those who feel for the suffering of its teeming millions, and those who feel they can and wish to help may read on. The rest should turn the page. Big money supports and motivates the wrong factions.

Dawn Metropolitan, which covers Karachi, frontpages the multifarious sufferings of the people of this city on a daily basis. Yesterday's leading headlines read: 'Installation attacked as water crisis deepens', 'Power shuts prolong miseries in hot weather', and a photograph depicted 'Shopkeepers in Saddar stand in front of their shops twiddling their thumbs as they remain without electricity for hours on end everyday.'

And we should all remember that water riots have very often contributed to the fall of governments.

At a seminar organized by the NGO Shehri in October 2001, Karachi's newly elected city nazim, Naimatullah Khan, promised, in his address to the gathering, that in the future Shehri and other such organizations and individuals would have no need to file public interest litigation cases in the superior courts as he would personally ensure that concerns and complaints are promptly addressed. He praised Shehri for its splendid efforts to protect public rights and asked others to emulate its example.

Sadly, it has slowly dawned on Naimatullah that good intentions get one nowhere. For eighteen months, he has battled against overwhelming odds that have thwarted his plans. The 'beradari' elected to the provincial assembly six months ago have realized that all useful and beneficent lawful power lies in the hands of the local government - land management, building control, water and sewerage, solid waste management, roads, development projects, and so forth. There is no ready money to be made doing the job which the representatives were elected to do - to legislate in the people's interest. Thus, efforts are being made to ensure that the devolution process fails, one effort being that the home secretary has informed Nazim Naimtullah that his life is in danger.

Then we have the control of the highly lucrative Karachi Building Control Authority (KBCA), right now floating in limbo. At the end of 2002, after a year's delay, the devolution of this critical department to the towns and city governments was carried out - but only on paper. Town building control officers, with their teams, were officially assigned to 18 towns, and a small central KBCA was designated to operate under the executive district officer (Works) of the city district government of Karachi. In practice, no one has moved to the towns, nor do the town nazims exercise any control over the land and buildings of their area. The chief controller of buildings, the twice retired and re-employed (though unqualified, as he is neither an architect nor an engineer) Brigadier Ahmedullah Sharif Nasir, has decided to operate under the patronage of the governor, bypassing both the city nazim and the chief minister, and is consequently a power unto himself.

Power has been devolved without adequate sources to sustain that power, thus the city and town governments are having difficulty in generating legitimate funds for the development of this fast-growing city. They are consequently susceptible to any environment-degrading 'get-rich-quick' scheme promoted by the numerous mafias that operate in Karachi, one recent example, under the influence of the builders, being the resurrection of the 'commercialization of roads' policy.

For the past 25 years, by resolutions passed by the governing body of the Karachi Development Authority, without any technical studies or planning, residential plots on six major roads in the city were subjected to on-again and off-again 'ribbon commercializations' - Sharah-e-Faisal, Tariq Road, Rashid Minhas Road, Sharah-e-Pakistan, University Road and Nazimabad 'A' Road. Those living on the surviving residential plots on these roads, sandwiched between badly - often illegally - constructed commercial plazas suffer incessantly and horribly, primarily from the unavailability of essential utilities such as water, sewerage and electricity, and also from noise and air pollution caused by generators, air-conditioning plants and traffic, lack of parking facilities, traffic congestion on the residential side-streets, lack of privacy, restrictions of light and ventilation, an increase in crime, and so on and so forth. The constitutional rights of residents occupying residential plots have been blatantly violated.

The last governing body of the KDA (of which I was a member) realized the folly and danger of this non-technical method of providing increased commercial spaces in the expanding city and in 1999 directed the master plan department to conduct surveys and develop an appropriate urban renewal/revitalization plan that would eliminate the damage caused by the strip commercialization policy. The new Building Regulations 2002 stress the necessity of a 'uniform commercialization policy' formulated 'on the basis of a comprehensive study of various urban areas', and have proscribed the commercialization of individual plots outside the policy.

Architect (but not a professional urban designer or town planner) Syed Zaigham Jaffery, is the Executive District Officer of Master Plan Group of Offices of the city government and the man on top of the pyramid of town planning in our city of over 1,700 sq km with a population of 13 million (projected to increase to over 20 million by 2015). As such, he is heir to Karachi's sole previous professional and able town planner, Ahmed Ali, who died many years ago (some say he was murdered) and shoulders the responsibility for correctly guiding the non-technical citizens and elected or non-elected administrators on what must rightly be done for the physical development and master planning of this mega-city.

Though a fiscally honest man, he has succumbed to political and bureaucratic pressures and has prompted a fresh commercialization of roads policy, adding nine roads in residential areas to the six already designated - Clifton Road, Khayaban-e-Jami, North Nazimabad Road, Khalid Bin Walid Road, Jamaluddin Afghani Road, Allama Iqbal Road, Sir Syed Ahmed Road, Shaheed-e-Millat Road and Shahrah-e-Jehangir.

Zaigham feels that he has done his professional duty by including a proviso in the policy that the monies generated will be utilized for the enhancement of the infrastructure in the residential localities degraded by the arbitrary change of land use, conveniently forgetting that such useless proviso has existed for commercialization undertaken for the past two decades and for the recent 'regularization of illegal buildings' exercise. He also forgets that the KDA/KBCA has admitted that the Rs1.3 billion generated from commercialization in 1989-99 was swallowed up by the salaries and expenses of profligate administrations, as were the 'regularization' monies.

The devastating 'regularization' ordinance of 2002 promulgated by flip-flop governor Mohammadmian Soomro (now the good-boy Senate chairman) expired on March 18. The history of the destruction of this city, if ever written, will not forgive him. In the space of one year, it wrought immense and irreversible damage to the built environment of Karachi. The KBCA has bent, distorted and misused the ordinance to heap benefits on the builders' mafia. Examples: the repair of a severely damaged building, Sumya Terrace, near the PTV station; regularization without provision of adequate parking; under-calculation of regularization penalties, thus depriving the government coffers of funds; non-provision of safety measures (fire-escapes, fire-sprinkler systems in parking basements); extension of the facility to illegalities constructed after the cut-off date - the list is pretty much endless.