Hats off to Syed Mustafa Kamal, the Nazim (Administrator) of Karachi, for what he did during his five years ending in 2007, particularly, to give a face-lift to the dilapidated infrastructure of Karachi, the city of lights. He pioneered many infrastructural development of the metropolis such as the underpasses, signal-free-corridors and bypasses of multiple arteries.
In spite of radical changes to the infrastructure, there is always room left for improvement as a planner or a team of planners can fail to spot a thing or two while planning which are addressed later on usually.
Here is the case of signal-free-corridors where vehicular traffic is no doubt plying without any hindrance but the senior citizens are affected tremendously to cross a thoroughfare as they are neither able to use a pedestrian bridge nor can they prefer to hire either a cab or a three-wheeler to cross a road.
I have witnessed many senior citizens compelled to risk their lives while crossing a road. Many wheel-chaired pensioners flock the Civic Centre, Gulshan-e-Iqbal, Karachi, to get their monthly pensions as they are bound to appear in person before the pension disbursing bank branch and they are physically unable to use a pedestrian bridge.
They have to hire a cab from their meagre monthly pension to cross a nearby road of Civic Centre in order to get a public transport.
In this regard, I want to invite attention of the pension disbursing branches all over Pakistan to devise a system to disburse pension at their homes and the city planners can ease the problems of the elderly by installing escalators at both sides of the pedestrian bridges of the metropolis.
