Infrastructure is meant to protect people. In Karachi, it has become the reason people are dying.
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Earlier this month, Karachi awoke once again to a tragedy that should shake any functioning society to its core. A three-year-old boy, Ibrahim, was walking along a familiar street when he slipped into a gaping manhole and never made it out. His body was recovered the next day, after a 15-hour rescue operation.
The CCTV clip many of us have now seen lasts only a few seconds, yet it’s impossible to forget: one moment he’s there; the next, he’s swallowed whole by the very city meant to protect him.
That hole didn’t open by chance. It was left yawning on a busy Karachi artery, unbarricaded, unmarked, unlit. And yet, we reach for the word “accident.” It isn’t. It’s the predictable consequence of a city abandoned to rot, theft, and overlapping jurisdictions, where the most basic promise of safety collapses under the weight of indifference.
An act of negligence, not a tragedy of nature
Karachi’s infrastructure is not just failing us; it is
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