KARACHI: Pakistan’s Minister for Maritime Affairs Ali Haider Zaidi on Tuesday announced the launch of a drive to clean up hundreds of tonnes of trash from a popular jetty in the port city of Karachi, almost a year after the Supreme Court ordered the move.
In June 2018, a Supreme Court commission on water and sanitation had instructed authorities to clean up the filthy Karachi and Korangi Fish Harbors. The court had said at the time that fish processing plants did not maintain required standards or dispose of trash properly. In response, the Fishermen Cooperative Society and Karachi Fish Harbor authorities both complained of insufficient funds to carry out necessary cleaning operations.
On Tuesday, Zaidi took to Twitter appealing to the people of Karachi to help him clear the Kiamari jetty and then posted pictures to show “we have started cleaning up the mess.”
Dr Asif Inam, Director General of the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), said several steps had been taken recently to curtail marine pollution in the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s orders.
“The Pakistan Navy and Karachi Port Trust, through mechanized boats, have started cleansing the floating debris, which comes to the sea through several sources, including from visitors throwing trash into the sea when they visit the Kiamari jetty,” Inam told Arab News, referring to a jetty from where people take frequent boat rides to the popular tourist destination of Manora peninsula. “There is no radical change but change has started happening,” the NIO official said.
A spokesman for the Fisherman Cooperative Society said on Tuesday that Karachi Fish Harbor Authority was in charge of lifting and disposing waste, which it was not doing.
Sagheer Ahmed, a spokesperson for the Karachi Fish Harbor Authority, in turn blamed the Fishermen's Cooperative Society for not taking care of waste.
In 2018, a study carried out by the Economist Intelligence Unit said pollution had made Karachi one of the world’s least liveable cities -- 134th on a list of 140 cities.
Around 450 million gallons of untreated industrial waste enter the Arabian Sea every day from Karachi, according to a WWF report.
Abdul Munaf Qaimkhani, a biodiversity consultant at the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, said the flow of debris, plastic, metals and other trash into the sea was just one problem facing Pakistan’s oceans. The major issue, he said, was the daily flow of 500 million gallons of untreated sewerage water into the sea, 450 million gallons of it emanating from Karachi, which only had the capacity to treat 100-150 million gallons of sewage water.
“This contaminated water and floating debris are dangerous for both navigation and marine life, which is a vital element of the future’s blue economy,” Qaimkhani said.
Dr. Yasir Ali Soomro, Assistant Professor at King Abdul-Aziz University Jeddah, who has researched coastal pollution in Karachi, said a special marine and coastal erosion department needed to be created, marine parks setup, clean-up campaigns run and an industrial tax instituted to tackle the city’s vast ocean pollution problem.
