Karachi, the largest city in Pakistan, faces various infrastructure issues that impact the daily lives of its residents. Some of the major infrastructure issues in Karachi are:
- Traffic congestion: Karachi is known for its heavy traffic, which results in long commutes and increased air pollution.
- Water scarcity: Many areas in Karachi experience water scarcity, which can result in widespread health problems and negatively impact the city’s economy.
- Poor sanitation: The city’s sewage and waste management systems are inadequate, leading to unhygienic living conditions and environmental pollution.
- Electricity outages: Karachi experiences frequent electricity outages, which can impact businesses and disrupt daily life for residents.
- Inadequate housing: The city’s rapid population growth has led to a shortage of affordable housing, resulting in overcrowding and informal settlements.
Infrastructure issues are becoming rather common in Karachi. Their main cause is the absence of effective infrastructure management.
The abounding of an eight four -inch water pipeline on University Road near Federal Urdu University in Karachi, which caused the main road to be flooded as vehicles plunged under more than a few feet of water in the parking areas, seemed almost like a strange scene from a film. The fact that it happened in one of Pakistan ‘major cities is concerning. The pipeline in question was forty-years-old and the immense leak happened when Karachi Water and Sewerage Board personnel were laboring on it. The issue was made worse when a passing car belonging to the KMC impaired a valve and released further water onto the Karachi roads.
Karachi has about fifteen thousand mostly exclusively owned intra and inter-city buses. There are no bus terminals in sight, bus workshops or bus depots for the buses. In turn, they use the roads for this reason. A services sector to these tasks grows around them.
This service sector consists of sleeping, eating, massage, relaxing and toilet facilities for the washing, servicing transporters and mechanics facilities for the vehicles; and beggars and hawkers for the commuters.
All the facilities are provided on the roads. As a result, in various main locations in the city (example Lea Market and sadder) over seventy per cent of road space is expended for these purposes. In addition to causing cramming and difficulties for the traffic movement, it results in mega scale environmental dilapidation and incongruous land-use changes at key locations along main corridors of movement.
Fights between residents, transporters and shopkeepers are regular wherever these amenities mature in an ad-hoc manner. As a result, many transporters service and park their automobiles beside their homes. This creates issues in their locale, as most of them live in the slender lanes of the inner city, lower middle income planned areas or katchi abadis .
Similarly, Karachi’s inner city markets have extended from obliging to a population of four fifty thousand in 1947 to supplying a population of ten million in 1998. The spreading out of these markets has taken place inside the inner city.
Most of Karachi’s astonishing strikingly built cultural heritage has been dragged down to be substituted by storage and warehouses, that this growth needs and meanwhile old community organizations and institutions have come to an end and a attractive constructed environment has been tainted. What remains, has to be recovered urgently.
Reports by the Heritage Cell, Department of Architecture and Planning at the Dawood College, evidently found that this rescuing is conceivable if a few of the markets, or even if a section of their activities, can be moved.
The above infrastructure problems are very serious; if these problems and matters are not sorted out then soon Karachi will be like every other slum city. Bad infrastructure not only creates living difficulties for people but also brings a million deadly diseases with it.
