Karachi had a rail-tram combination system since 1860s, which served the entire inner city’s known destinations, for the city commuters and for the suburban traffic, coming by NWR from Hyderabad and other towns too. This was destroyed in 1975, under bus operator’s lobby, leading to acute saturation of most city roads.
KCR revival will cost $1.558bn, adding to Pakistan’s already hefty debts, whose debt servicing takes away 90 percent of resources, as alleged by some leaders. KCR cannot serve Karachi’s mass transit needs.
MOC led RTC study of 1974-77, while refining the 1974 UNDP Master Plan’s Metro spine, for financial viability. It offers the first phase of 7km basement level metro from Tower to illegally occupied Jahangir Government quarters, could be easily completed in a fraction of the cost of KCR revival project, relieving the acute saturation of the worst traffic corridor along Mohammad Ali Jinnah Road, as also its heavy diversion on Shahrah-e-Faisal.
Needless to mention, as envisaged earlier, this could easily be implemented with local resources, even utilising the existing old KCR rolling stock to start with till our industries could acquire capability to fabricate these locally.
This will revive the vital PR-metro interface at Tower, besides creating a central bus terminal, with metro interface in the basement, high-rise commercial complex and a central park. The disturbed people could be rehabilitated in four-storied economical housing, in a small area in this locality or at some other suitable site.
In view of this analysis, as the author of the 1975-77 RTC Plan, I would strongly recommend the authorities to have the RTC plan reviewed, as ordered by the then federal government, headed by Shaheed Z A Bhutto himself, in Dec 1975, through local consultants with minimum foreign input.
S M H RIZVI
Karachi
