Karachi: A massive number of people participated in a rally to demand provision of all modern civic and amenity services in Karachi.
The rally from the Quaidabad area of the city used the busiest road of Karachi, Sharea Faisal, to reach the Sindh Governor House in the downtown. The “Haq Do Karachi Rally” (Give rights to Karachi Rally) was taken out under the aegis of Jamaat-e-Islami (JI). The rally ended late on Sunday night after its participants took part in a protest sit-in outside the Governor House.
JI Karachi chief Hafiz Naeem-ur-Rehman announced on the occasion that ending the protest sit-in would not mean that the movement to secure rights for Karachiites had come to an end as in fact it would further be accelerated.
He said that soon a similar protest sit-in would be held outside the Sindh Chief Minister House if the situation of chaos in provision of civic and municipal services persisted any further in Karachi.
The JI leader informed participants of the rally that the main issue that Karachi had been denied its basic rights was that its population had been massively undercounted in the last census drive of Pakistan.
Fair representation
He demanded that the people of Karachi should get proper and fair representation in the National and Sindh assemblies in accordance with the actual population count of the city.
He lamented the situation that the Karachi accounted for up to 70 per cent revenue generated in Pakistan but still its residents had been denied basic civic and utility services like clean drinking water, uninterrupted electric supply, and modern system of mass transportation.
He said the mass transit system had been developed in Islamabad, Lahore, Multan, and Peshawar but the same facility had yet to be launched in Karachi.
A bulk water supply system for residents of Karachi had been incomplete since last many years, he added.
