KARACHI: Amidst the debate about the utility of a flyover near the shrine of Hazrat Abdullah Shah Ghazi in Clifton, the problems of the residents and people visiting the area are sidelined.
As a large number of cars stand in a queue near a diversion point at Shahrah-i-Firdausi near Park Towers, there is confusion about where the road leads to. Those who came to work in the area and those who resided there had similar issues. Majority of the complaints were about the time it now takes to reach a nearby destination.
Work on the project stopped on an order of the Sindh High Court issued on a Defence Housing Authority lawsuit on April 29 and what once was a clean wide road is now full of debris of the construction work that started in haste around March.
Drivers squatting outside a residential apartment at Bilawal Chowrangi, near restaurant Bar B.Q. Tonight, said it took them half an hour to reach nearby places or if one was coming from the 26th Street. “The diversion board that they have put up is not always useful,” says Noor Rehman, aged 66. “Once I took a right turn from a diversion road from Park Towers thinking I’ll get towards the road leading to the shrine. But I was diverted back to the British Council Road. So, I ended up taking a longer route.”
The routes of the buses has also changed, complained another. Asif Ahmed, a resident of New Karachi, comes to work at the Park Towers Mall every day. “I have to take two buses every day — from New Karachi to Merewether Tower and from there to the bus stop right outside Park Towers. “But since the start of this project the routes have gone haywire. The bus drops off most passengers at the PTCL exchange, which is a block away, citing skewed diversion roads as their excuse.”
The residents were quite unanimous in their opposition of the flyover and an underpasses — at least during the interviews. Only one of them spoke about the value it will add to their “ancestral property and get us a good price later on,” while others were more disturbed about the monsoon forecast for Karachi and the impending nuisance it would mean for them. Amber Noor, a resident living besides the Mohatta Palace Museum, got angry when asked about the project and the inconvenience caused by it. “They should reconstruct the entire thing. Why have they left (the rubble) in the middle like that? This is such a callous thing to do. The saddest thing about this city is how anyone can easily start a project of such a massive scale without taking necessary permissions and then just abandon it like that without any consideration for the inconvenience it might cause to the public,” she added.
On the other end of the road — leading from the Mohatta Palace Museum — is the Shri Ratneshwar Mahadev Temple whose fate has been hanging in the balance since the day the project began. In spite of the court’s stay order and no apparent danger to the temple, the guards protecting it sit near the broken concrete and guard the main entrance anyway. One of the caretakers inside the temple said he was worried for the future of the temple. “If it rains the water will pour in around the temple and seep in through the walls this time around because of the drilling during the construction work. Let’s see what happens eventually,” he said cutting short his argument.
Recently, it was reported in newspapers and TV news channels that Bahria Town had completely abandoned the project after feeling disillusioned with the number of stay orders it received after initiating the project for the “good of the people”.
However, Karachi Metropolitan Corporation Administrator Rauf Akhter Farooqui said that the KMC “hasn’t received an official statement from Bahria Town in this regard.” Explaining, he said: “Everything depends on what the court eventually ask us to do.”
Published in Dawn, May 16th, 2014