This portion of the Gujjar Nullah continues to be choked and people living in its vicinity fear that their localities might be hit by flooding in the rains if the nullah is not cleared before the arriving monsoon. When the executive district officer of the city government’s municipal services department, Masood Alam, was contacted to seek his comment on the nullah’s clogging, he explained that cleaning work of all the 500 such drains of the 18 towns and two major nullahs – Lyari and Malir – was under way and about 70 per cent of the work had been completed. About the Gujjar Nullah, he said that as its cleaning had been undertaken from its discharging point, it had so far been cleaned from Lyari to Sir Syed Girls College while its remaining portion would be cleared of all rubbish and solid waste in a couple of weeks. He, however, admitted that the presence of encroachments on either side of various nullahs, which have been turned into garbage dumping grounds, were creating hurdles in the cleaning works. “At all those points where the nullahs are either heavily encroached upon or covered, we are unable to employ cleaning machines and as such only kundi-men are employed to clean those portions despite the fact that poisonous gasses emitting from choked and covered nullahs often claim their lives,” he added.—Text by Azizullah Sharif and photo by Fahim Siddiqi / White Star