Tough living
IT has happened again. Karachi — Pakistan’s largest city, financial centre and revenue generator — was ranked by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) as one of the least liveable cities in the world — a source of shame for the country’s rulers.
Everyone in Karachi knows that the ranking is the most honest thing to be said about the city every year. If the city could speak, its screams of desperation would be heard across several galaxies. The messy mix of intense heat, power outages, water shortages and corruption means that every step Karachi dwellers take is fraught with danger and uncertainty. To wake up in Karachi in the summer of 2026 is to prepare oneself to battle a city that has been so abused and neglected that it abuses those who dare to leave their homes and enter its dug-up, garbage-rutted roads. To sleep in this city is to lie on sweat-soiled sheets under unmoving fans in airless rooms — the fresh wounds of the day stinging, the old ones barely scabbed over.
Around the time of the release of the EIU’s latest Global Liveability Index, a pipeline burst for the umpteenth time on University Road. Construction continues on this arterial road, and the digging always does more damage than good. This time, too, the road was flooded; people were stuck — in cars, on motorcycles and in buses — in the sweltering heat. Being stuck is a constant condition in Karachi. Everyone who is in Karachi at a particular time is stuck there. An unliveable city is endured, and not enjoyed — but now even those with the most endurance cry out for relief.
The wealthy have created their own enclave by the ocean, where they try their best to deny the rest of the city’s existence. In that lucky place, flooded roads actually drain into sewers and manholes quite often have covers. Public service provision failures, the lack of electricity and water and all such issues can be solved with private capital. These basic services that the rest of the city imagines it would receive because it pays taxes are procured here via hired tankers that deliver water. Electrical outages are avoided by large generators housed in their own buildings.
Karachi belongs to everyone and, therefore, to no one at all.
Before I sat down to write this column, a friend asked whether I thought writing a never-ending lament about Karachi’s condition would change the city’s situation. The question was serious, but came across as a joke — because of the idea that words could spur change or inspire the sort of transformation that has, for instance, taken place in Lahore or Islamabad. It is no small irony that the snippet about Karachi being five spots away from being the least liveable city in the world (and those other spots were largely taken by war-torn cities like Damascus), came alongside an announcement of several hundred million rupees being allocated for a high-speed train in Lahore and — wait for it — a Rawalpindi-Murree glass train.
Surely the progress in urban development in these other cities shows that there is nothing particular about the Pakistani psyche that prevents the authorities from planning and running a city. The trouble, as innumerable others have pointed out, is not a matter of not knowing how but being stymied by structural factors. The biggest of these is the reality that Pakistan is a country where, by and large, lawmakers still fight for funds for their constituencies, often dictated by the politics of ethnicity.
Karachi’s biggest tragedy then is that it is a multiethnic city. It belongs to everyone and, therefore, it belongs to no one at all. The problem that this poses is that everyone expects someone else to be fighting for Karachi, for getting funds allocated that would solve simple problems, for sorting out the corruption that keeps large portions of main roads dug up for years, for untangling the challenges that keep companies like K-Electric in such a mess that foreign investors express interest and then shy away.
Some would argue that this city, which belongs to everyone, is too big to fail. A city of 22 million can never be erased; its magnetic pull is a force of its own. But this is small solace for those suffering within its environs.
A city as big as Karachi cannot cease to exist, but it can be starved and throttled. That is the condition of the place today: a city of migrants, a city of hope, a city of survivors, limited in every way possible — its people deemed unworthy of glass trains and high-speed rails bestowed on luckier Pakistanis. And so it is that every morning, there are 22m people in Karachi wondering what it must be like to wake up in a city that does not fight them every hour of every day.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, July 11th, 2026 ...
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