Karachi emerged as the most modern, a metropolis with dazzling colonial buildings, commercial centers, big hotels, and well-designed residential areas that rivalled Bombay along the same coast toward the East. The sea and clean beaches added to the natural beauty of this city, then its beauty vanished.
The decline of Pakistan is not just economic, political, and social, it is total, and it strikes one when entering any small, medium, or large city, including the once ‘Islamabad the beautiful.’ In every city, traffic is a mess, there are encroachments on the roads, occupation of public lands and shanty towns, often on public lands, along streams, railway lines and green areas.
The reasons for this urban decay are known to all in Pakistan from the masses to people of wealth, privilege and power. The latter are the ones responsible for Pakistan’s urban problems because of their insatiable greed for wealth accumulation, through syndicates of land developers, politicians and bureaucrats. Together, and for mutual benefit, they have converted agricultural lands around Pakistan’s cities into housing colonies. This has become the biggest business where most black money is parked.
And then the judiciary looks on like an spectator, the powerful institutions included. There is now hardly any state institution that doesn’t have a series of housing colonies to benefit employees, but it is no secret that most of the owners who build houses are second buyers.
The youngsters think there is no chance of the coming of that beauty of old times, so they are leaving for better prospectss in hordes.
