The Sindh government was weighing options to transfer power down for two of giant institutions, the Sindh Solid Waste Management Board (SSWMB) and Sindh Building Control Authority (SBCA) to the division level. Sindh has five divisions: Larkana, Mirpurkhas, Sukkur, Hyderabad, Shaheed Benazirabad and Karachi. And in undoing this act of centralization it set in motion six years ago, the Sindh government will make one of its best decisions. This information came out of Chief Minister House in one of its daily handouts, on Wednesday. It was oddly placed in the press note on the CM’s meeting with a Jamaat-e-Islami delegation and given a positive spin like this: local bodies would be strengthened by making necessary amendments to the Local Government Act. The Sindh government has legislated 20 times on local government since 2010. The entire thrust of its law-changing drive has been to take power away from the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation or KMC and create entities that would work at the provincial government level. Hence, the Sindh Building Control Authority from the Karachi Building Control Authority, whose job it is to approve building and construction proposals across the city. In 2014, it set up the Sindh Solid Waste Management Board. The problem is that the debate has raged since on whether Karachi’s garbage collection has improved. The same thing was done with the KBCA and SBCA the same year. The CM, during a meeting with a visiting delegation, said he was ready to hold local bodies election but before that the government had to decide and notify the census. The JI and other parties have demanded a fresh census as they disagreed with the results. The 2017 count said there was 16 million people in Karachi and about 47 million in all of Sindh, but these numbers appeared to be low. The MQM-Pakistan has demanded a fresh population survey in Karachi before the 2023 elections. The CM told the vistors that this was taken up in the Council of Common Interests which was scheduled to meet November 11.
