`I Own Karachi` and can sell it! By Ardeshir Cowasjee

2009 : `I Own Karachi` and can sell it! By Ardeshir Cowasjee February 22nd, 2009 KARACHI, this increasingly ravaged city, has a dire history of the conversion of amenity plots to commercial and residential use. Virtually every `ruler` or administrator has left his mark on the exploding metropolis by giving away what was not his to give — public spaces and civic-use plots that were planned by experts for the common good. At the Corporate Summit on Climate Change held in Karachi last Thursday, the city nazim Mustafa Kamal told a gathering of some 200 businessmen, industrialists, environmentalists, academics and NGOs that he had learnt that day for the first time of the importance of the environment. He admitted to being unfamiliar with the Environment Protection Act 1997 and with the effects of climate change. He welcomed an offer from Leadership for Environment & Development Pakistan to assist him in evaluating his development strategy and his proposed solutions to the city`s problems, including mass transportation, treatment of 400 million gallons per day of raw sewage presently being dumped into the sea, and the management of 10,000 tons of garbage generated daily. Coincidentally, whilst the nazim was speaking at the DHA Golf Club, members of the MQM were passing a City Council resolution at the KMC Hall, barely eight miles away, converting over 40 acres of amenity space at Sewage Treatment Plant-2 in Mehmoodabad (located at N24o51`6`, E67o04`27` on Google-Earth) into a housing colony. This was done despite the protests of opposition members who foresaw `horrible devastation` if land assigned for a treatment plant expansion was swallowed up. They explained that many previous attempts to misuse and convert amenity spaces had been struck down by the courts. In July 2008, a similar illegal conversion (`commercialisation`) of a 2.5-acre space on the Clifton beach was attempted by the City Council treasury benches (over the objections of the opposition members) for use as a five-star hotel-cum-shopping complex. Earlier this month, a blitz of ads in the press announced the auction of the beach plot for a reserved price of Rs119 crores.