Daily Times

KARACHI: The Supreme Court-appointed judicial commission on water quality and drainage in Sindh on Friday ordered municipal authorities in Karachi to dismiss all Muslim sanitation workers from service after it was told that these employees were receiving salaries but not performing their duties including cleaning of sewers.

During the hearing, Justice (retd) Amir Hani Muslim, who heads the one-member commission, expressed annoyance at the presence of garbage heaps all across the city’s central district. When Central District Municipal Corporation (DMC) chairman Rehan Hashmi told him that Muslim workers were not performing duties, he asked him about the exact number of such workers. To this, Hashmi said that at least 200 of the district’s 1,200 sweepers were Muslims. The judge directed that any employee not performing his tasks should immediately be fired and be replaced with others who should be made to earn their salaries.

The DMC chairman informed the commission that Muslim workers had been hired in the past but they refused to clean sewers, and were still drawing their salaries.

Similar directives were issued for Korangi district administration and the Sindh Solid Waste Management Board that is responsible for management of solid waste in the remaining jurisdictions across the city, except for the Cantonment Boards. Justice Muslim remarked that municipal matters of the city would suffer if appointments were made on political basis. Hashmi also told the court that his office lacked resources and machinery to rid the city of garbage completely.

In the hearing, Local Government secretary Ramzan Awan informed the commission that as many as 50 per cent of DMC employees were habitually absent from their service. “White-collar sweepers have been hired all over Sindh while political appointments are common in Karachi,” he said, adding that around 1,380 DMC workers out of a total of 13,000 were found to be ghost employees.

Before adjourning the hearing until April 5, the commission also ordered the SSWMB and the Cantonment Boards to ensure through their contractors and employees that ‘all the solid municipal waste is removed from the city’.

The deputy commissioners were ordered to supervise the removal of waste from their districts. “The heaps of garbage all over in Karachi shall be cleaned,” the commission observed. Earlier this month, Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar had expressed his displeasure over presence of heaps of garbage littering Karachi’s cityscape and ordered the authorities to ensure that all trash is removed within the week. “I want a neat and clean Karachi within a week,” CJ Nisar had observed while hearing a petition regarding Sindh’s water and sewerage problems at the Supreme Court’s Karachi registry.

During the proceedings, Justice Nisar directed Mayor Waseem Akhtar to clean the city in a week. On this, the city mayor informed the court that under the existing legal and administrative framework, he was not empowered to look after solid waste management, which was a task reserved for the provincial government.

Published in Daily Times, March 31^st 2018.