The inclusive resettlement of ML-1 clears the track of living obstacles

Nearly 15,000 people risk losing their homes in Karachi, Hyderabad and Lahore to make way for Pakistan’s most ambitious railway project: Main Line-1 for which work will kick off in January.

The estimate of families at risk was done by Karachi Urban Lab with satellite data which was ground truthed in neighbourhoods sitting along the track between the Karachi and Lahore corridor. If at least 25 feet of the track need to be clear on both sides, over 2,400 people will have to vacate it. These are the working class drivers, maids, salesmen, carpenters, masons, and daily wage workers who live and work here.

Such a displacement is called ‘the constitutive violence of corridor-making’. This is a technology of community wiping needed for governments to build big things. And so, violence lives at the heart of the creation of economic and transport corridors and is not an outcome as many of us assume.

If we track how such epic projects unfold in the cities of the Global South we can clearly see that transport corridors are political acts and not merely technical undertakings. They bear the stamp of their creators (decision-makers) who are the arbiters of who qualifies as an urban citizen and who can be sacrificed. They do not see evictions as an assault on social ties, laws, the economy, indeed legal and economic failures. They are a small price to pay for some greater good.

The Karachi-to-Peshawar 1,726 km ML-1 upgrade will link three quarters of Pakistan’s rail freight and passenger traffic. It is being paid for by China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and its cost has been brought down to $6.678 billion. Two billion dollars will be on loan from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to pay for the first phase for the Rohri–Karachi section.

The improvements involve a double track, electrification, signaling and 160 kph speed, all of which are needed after decades of neglect. But the project documents do not seem to have a credible plan to resettle the thousands of families living in the way.

Haven’t we heard this before?

Displacement is a........

© Dawn Prism