Mayor terms 100-day performance as satisfactory

Karachi: Mayor of Karachi Waseem Akhtar on Friday rated his 100-day performance in office as satisfactory, saying under a cleanliness drive some one million tonnes of garbage had been removed.

Addressing a press conference to review the 100-day tenure of the municipal offices, he said that despite the lack of power and resources, his team worked in 21 union councils to fulfil their promise of cleaning up the city.

He said that the chief minister had assured him that he would also help the mayor in the cleanliness drive but he never came forward to help.

This financial hub of Pakistan has been experiencing a severe backlogue of domestic, commercial and industrial waste for some time. The city, experts estimate, generate more than 12,000 tonnes of trash daily but the lack of resources and inefficiencies allows the removal of a mere one-third of the garbage; the rest is strewn on the streets and in the alleys.

The mayor said that he wrote many letters to the provincial government demanding the jurisdiction of the Solid Waste Management Board, Water and Sewerage Board as well as six other civic agencies, so that the municipal government could deliver to the city.

However, he got no reply, he said.

Akhtar said that he was wondering whether he should knock the Supreme Court of Pakistan’s door to retrieving the local government’s powers.

The mayor said that all the encroachments along the Gujjar Nala, one of the key sewer lines in the city, were removed and the bed of the Nala was also cleaned. Now, he said, it was the responsibility of the Sindh government to construct the roads or parapet wall along both the banks of it so it could not be encroached upon again.

He wondered where the Rs1,000 billion (Dh35 billion) allocated to the development of the city had been spent by the government

Meanwhile, the Sindh High Court has sought the details of the expenditures on the cleaning of the city.

The provincial court gave three-week notices to the federal and provincial governments as well as the cantonments to come up with the outlays of the garbage cleaning expenditures in the next hearing.

Abdul Hameed Gadia had filed the petition in the court, seeking its intervention into the worse conditions of sewerage and heaps of garbage in the city.