City Mayor Waseem Akhtar has said the Supreme Court had passed a directive in 2017 and the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation had given an estimate of Rs1.12 billion to the court for cleaning nullahs.” He said the court had then asked the Sindh government to release the amount, but it only issued Rs500 million. In a statement issued the City Mayor Waseem Akhtar stressedonly Rs500 million has been issued to the KMC to clean drains in the last four years, and details of the funds’ expenditures have already been given to the Sindh government.City Mayor Waseem Akhtar maintained that the funds for cleaning drains were not released to the KMC after that, while thenullahs continued to brim with trash. “There are 500 small drains under the administrative control of district municipal corporation and [enough] funds have not been issued to clean them,” he said.The mayor stated that drains in the metropolis had not been cleaned since 2018, when Rs500 million was issued to the KMC on the directives of the Supreme Court.City Mayor Waseem Akhtar claimed that the tenders were issued and he had personally overviewed the cleanliness campaign then, adding that the Sindh government still owed Rs720 million to the KMC. City Mayor Waseem Akhtar added that following the issuance of urban flooding warning by the National Disaster Management Authority, he had held a press conference to inform the relevant authorities that the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation did not have enough funds to de-silt the rainwater drains and wrote letters to the Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah but the provincial government did not pay any heed.
