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Since the inauguration of Lyari Expressway for southern-bound traffic I have been using this expressway almost daily to travel to my office. However, every morning no sooner my journey on Lyari Expressway begins, stretching out from its start point off Sohrab Goth till its finish point somewhere at Gul Bai/Agra Taj ie Mauripur Road, a flimsy sheet of melancholic feeling wraps itself all across my mind when flattened walls of demolished houses.
Once built on the bank of Lyari river and occupied by their poor owners, are speedily left past behind me, leaving trails of entangled thoughts in my mind that wherever those poor displaced families now relocated somewhere on any of the stretched corners of this city.
Once living in their modest houses scattered on both sides of Lyari river they must never have thoughts or perhaps the thought had never touched their heads that one day they would be thrown out of their houses for the sake of building a mega project at the expense of taking away all their dreams associated with their houses and families.
Shanty towns, slums or ghetto, whatever name they may be given, are very much in existence in every corner and part of the world be it suburbs of New York, city of London or Dubai. One may always find slums, but they are there not to envy the richness of riches nor to grab their wealth but entwined in their own humble world which is sometimes even grabbed away form their reach as these shanty towns are deemed as an eye sore to the modernity of a city.
As was envisaged during the previous government in the name of mega project of Lyari Expressway when around 15,000 families were dislocated by demolishing their houses and sending them to point zero to begin with, leaving thousands of young men deprived of their daily-based employment, and dropping out of hundreds, if not thousands, of children from their schools.
One does not challenge nor defy importance of better means of communication, highways and expressways for economic progress and prosperity. The theme behind Lyari Expressway project was perhaps the same as initiated by the then Musharraf government for goods-carrying heavy vehicular traffic ferrying from upcountry to the Port area and vice versa but so far it is restricted to light vehicular traffic only.
If there was no end result of this mega project then why such an unpopular mega project was undertaken at the cost of poor people's tears and cries by displacing them. Perhaps this is something which undemocratic governments, elected or voted by the people and for the people, will ever understand.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2008

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