For a clean Karachi

Karachi’s waste management problem is nothing new, with around 16,000 tonnes of garbage generated in the city last year by a population of over 13 million residents. Most of it makes it to two huge landfills in the city but around 30 percent remains on the streets. It was only when the ravaging monsoon season that hit the city last month that the garbage problem became hard to ignore, as it came to the surface, floating atop flooded streets. The response by the federal and provincial governments has been underwhelming, to say the least. The Sindh governor claimed he could clean up Karachi in two weeks but after realizing that it was not a two-week job, he quickly changed his position to ask for more time and assistance. Meanwhile, the provincial government – split between the mayor of Karachi from the MQM and the PPP running the province – has not had much success either. While Sindh CM Murad Ali Shah has limited his response to the problem by making statements that he is ‘looking into the problem’, Karachi Mayor Waseem Akhtar was relatively more proactive. But he too made something of a joke of the matter by appointing the controversial former mayor of Karachi Mustafa Kamal to head the ‘garbage disposal project’ only to remove him within hours from the post for ‘political point-scoring’.Prime Minister Imran Khan has formed a committee headed by the MQM’s Farogh Naseem, to address the issues being faced by the residents of Karachi. To make matters worse, all three parties, the PTI, PPP, and the MQM-P have been at each other’s throats over the disastrous effects of this monsoon season that usually spares Karachi. This has been a long time coming as consecutive governments over the past years have not considered this as an issue that required their attention. Rather than bickering over it now, all stakeholders will have to work together to get the required funds and manpower to remove the garbage first and then create a proper waste management infrastructure for proper and efficient disposal so that it does not pile up again over time.Warda ShahzadiKarachi

from The News International - Newspost https://ift.tt/2LMGFS9