Clogged Karachi awaits promised rail system

Clogged Karachi awaits promised rail system

By Ovais Subhani

KARACHI (Reuter): Like many of Asia's fast-growing cities, Pakistan's financial and commercial capital Karachi is choking on traffic, and mass transit is still only a promise.

A century ago, British rulers laid a 16-km (10-mile) diesel tramway in the business district of Karachi, recognizing the port city's growing needs.

The tracks were torn up in 1975 to make way for a mass transit system for this city on the Arabian Sea, whose population by then had swollen to 4.5 million.

Now, some 12 million people live in Karachi, and commuters once again are being promised relief from the traffic-choked streets.

In January 1996, the prime ministers of Pakistan and Canada signed a deal to build 13.7 km (8-1/2 miles) of partly elevated light rail tracks at a cost now estimated at $666 million.

Canada's Jean Chretien signed the accord on behalf of the Indus Mass Transit Company (IMTC), a consortium comprising SNC- Lavalin of Canada, Sezai Turkes Feyzi Akkaya Construction Co. of Turkey and Adcon Engineering of Pakistan.

The 13.7-km track is only part of the first priority corridor recommended by a 1986 city master plan that envisioned six such corridors with a total length of 87.4 km (55 miles).

Work on the much-delayed light rail system, designed to relieve congestion and pollution emitted by about a million vehicles, is due to start by March 1998, officials said.

"We are confident that with final approval of a revised financial plan, the sponsors will achieve financial close before December and actual construction will start by March 1998," Tahir Somroo, Sindh province's transport secretary, told Reuters.

An IMTC spokesman said the first 13.7 km of track would start carrying passengers early in 2000, assuming the consortium meets its deadline for financial closure in December this year.

An earlier deadline of June 1997 was missed after the cash- strapped government failed to arrange funds and loan guarantees totaling $235 million which it had agreed to provide.

Somroo said the government was now seeking bridge financing for part of its commitments as the federal budget for fiscal 1997/98 allotted no funds to the Karachi mass transit project.

Provincial officials say the lukewarm attitude of successive federal governments had made the project politically sensitive. Karachi residents have long felt aggrieved at what they see as deliberate neglect of their city's creaking infrastructure and civic amenities, citing it as one reason for the political violence that has flourished in recent years.

Soon after independence in 1947, Karachi became the focus for commercial and industrial growth, turning into a metropolis with traffic problems as severe as any other world city.

Government studies in 1952 and 1974 recommended upgrading the British-laid tram tracks. Instead, they were uprooted.

Road accidents, traffic jams and congestion continued to plague the city as small buses, vans and three-wheeler rickshaws belched out fumes and preyed on the nerves of city-dwellers.

Violence erupted in Karachi in April 1985 after a passenger van ran over a college girl. The unrest swiftly took an ethnic turn since ethnic Pashtuns dominated the public transport system while most commuters were Mohajirs -- Urdu-speaking Moslems who had migrated to Pakistan from India after partition in 1947.

Ethnic tensions may have deeper roots, but the transport system provided a flashpoint for violence, which has since become almost endemic and cost several thousand lives.

A judicial commission, set up after the 1985 clashes, in which hundreds of people were killed, identified the absence of a mass transit system as a major cause of the unrest.

In 1986, the government launched a Karachi mass transit study with World Bank support. It was conducted by a consortium of consultants, including Maunsells of Britain, Parsons Brinckerhoff of the United States and Ilyas Sons of Pakistan.

The study recommended building 87.4 km of partly elevated exclusive bus ways which could later be converted to light rail tracks. It identified six priority corridors for development. But because of a lack of funds, the detailed engineering, design, environmental impact assessment and resettlement plans were completed for only two of the six corridors.

Tenders in 1990 and 1995 seeking contractors who would construct the system on a build-operate-transfer basis, resulted in the selection of IMTC to build Corridor-1 for $586 million and Interinfra French Co. to build Corridor-2 for $1.1 billion. After much debate and political wrangling, then prime minister Benazir Bhutto gave the go-ahead for Corridor-1.

Somroo said the Sindh provincial government had recently agreed to take a $13 million equity stake in the project to cut the federal government's equity commitment to $47 million.

He refused to disclose specific proposals made to the sponsors, saying they might be made public after approval by their parent companies and major lenders. He said further delay would lead to cost overruns and more expensive loan repayments.

A Sindh government minister, who asked not to be identified, said the project seemed expensive to the federal government but had the full support of Karachi-based political parties.

"If this opportunity is lost, it may never come around again," he said. "We have already taken several international firms through an intense and much dragged-out exercise.

"Pakistan stands a good chance of losing international credibility if this deal doesn't go through," he added.