Overwhelmed by the city’s population explosion and the continuing degradation of its infrastructure, the government asked the United Nations (UN) to help it overcome Karachi’s compounding problems. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) agreed and a new ‘master plan’ known as the ‘Karachi Master Plan’ was drawn up. The plan envisaged the development of 40,000 residential units per year, between 1968 and 1985.
In the early 1950s, the MRV Plan had predicted the city’s population to reach three million by the year 2001, but Hasan points out that the city’s population grew so rapidly that it reached this figure by 1972!
During Z.A. Bhutto's regime (1971-77), Karachi began receiving migrants from the interior of Sindh and Biharis from what was then called East Pakistan. In 1972, the city experienced its second bout of ethnic riots.
In his biography of Z.A. Bhutto, Stanley Wolpert wrote that lamenting the degradation of the city in a letter written to his Sindh CM in 1973, Bhutto sounded almost helpless.
To bring in money to the city, the Bhutto regime began a project to attract moneyed tourists from rich Arab countries and Europe. For this the government began planning the construction of casinos and more five-star hotels. But this plan too was shelved when the regime fell in 1977.
Hasan writes that even though Karachi had become a socially liberal melting pot of various ethnic cultures as well as the entertainment capital of the country between the 1950s and the late 1970s, by 1977, over two million people were living in its shanty towns. In 1976, Karachi witnessed its third major episode of urban flooding.
In the 1980s, the city received yet another migrant influx, this time in the form of thousands of Afghans from war-torn Afghanistan. Many of them brought with them guns and drugs. D.K. Bergen in her book War and Drugs points out that there was just one case of heroin addiction reported in Karachi in 1979. By 1985, though, the city had the second-largest population of heroin addicts in the world. Crime, too, shot up manifold and so did the frequency of ethnic clashes.
As the city’s infrastructural problems continued to compound, the hold of the so-called land, transport and drug mafias tightened and they were facilitated by corrupt police and bureaucracy. By 1987, 3.4 million people were living in crime-infested shanty towns. Finally, in the 1990s, the city’s infrastructure completely collapsed.
The city’s sprawling, congested and chaotic edifice became a much-favoured hiding and hunting ground for all kinds of undesirables — drug peddlers, land grabbers, criminal gangs — and this resulted in the eruption of ethnic violence. By the 2000s, extremist outfits, too, began setting up shop here to exploit and enjoy the fruits of chaos.
There are now so many criss-crossing political, economic and ethnic interests clashing against each other in the city that it has become next to impossible to solve its many problems through a consensus. A report published on May 4, 1988 in the Chicago Tribune warned that Karachi is bound to one day become ‘unlivable.’ This year the city was positioned at number six in the list of “10 worst cities of the world” by The Economist's Intelligence Unit.
According to a July 6, 2017 study by the World Bank, Karachi would need up to 10 billion dollars of capital investment to fully address its ongoing infrastructural problems. Without this it will soon become entirely ungovernable.
Published in Dawn, EOS, September 10th, 2017