- Karachi must tighten building laws, as must other cities
The collapse of a building in Karachi’s Gulbahar was not a stand-alone event, but it also brought down two adjacent buildings, and ended up killing 14 people. This follows other building collapses and a couple of serious fires in Karachi as well as Lahore. The Karachi collapse shows the danger created by the rising price of land, as an owner was tempted to build a sixth storey on a five-story building, which was already on an 80-yard plot. A five-story building on such a small plot is already asking for trouble, and a sixth storey was merely guaranteeing it, and the collapse occurred during construction. As the adjacent buildings were also multi-storey, the confusion was further compounded.
The Sindh Chief Minister has ordered an enquiry into whether the expansion had been approved by the Karachi Building Control Authority, but a more precise enquiry would encompass whether the laws themselves, including therein all rules, regulations and bye-laws, are adequate, and to what extent are they implemented. The enquiry should not just be directed against the greedy building owner, but the officials who turned a blind eye because they had been bribed substantially. However, there is no bypassing the laws of physics. Contravening them has serious consequences, which proved tragic in Gulbahar.
While such tragedies must be stopped by proper planning and implementation of laws in Karachi, provincial governments must pay attention to the situations brewing in so-called smaller cities, in all provinces, like Hyderabad in Sindh, Quetta in Balochistan, Peshawar in KP, and Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Gujranwala and Multan in Punjab, as well as the federal capital Islamabad itself, which all have populations of more than a million, according to the 2017 census, not to forget the 77 other municipalities with a population of over 100,000. Though the country is still classified as rural, with just over 63 percent of the population in rural areas, according to the last census, that means that there are about 72 million people in conurbations, who need to be protected from tragedies like the one in Gulbahar by effective legislation and rigorous implementation. That will require attention from the provincial governments, in whose jurisdictions building laws fall. It is not just the Sindh government which must put its shoulder to the wheel, though it must handle the attention now.
