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forced displacement

  • Attending a public hearing for the Environmental Impact Assessment of the Karachi Circular Railway. The KCR project is implicated in large-scale demolitions and forced displacement, primarily impacting informal settlements bordering the railway tracks.

    For context, read more about the stories of KCR affectees here.

    You can read the (inaccessibly long) EIA report below:

    kcr-eiaDownload

    To contextualize the report, you can pair it with this article.

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  • Today I went with some friends to the Gujjar Nala for a door-to-door survey activity. Our goal was to interview resident and document the legal status and condition of the homes before their imminent demolition.

    The operation is being carried out in response to catastrophic flooding that took place in August 2020. The government believes the flooding was caused by informal settlements “encroaching” on Karachi’s storm water drains.

    Children jumping on a trampoline in front of the wreckage of their homes
    An elderly Gujjar nala resident questions where he is supposed to relocate to in his old age, and asks why he and his family are being displaced after he has faithfully paid his bills for years?
    For anyone who’s seen the nala in person, it’s immediately clear that the cause of the flooding is the garbage choking it and not the homes adjacent to it.
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  • In the vicinity of Gujjar Nala, loudspeaker announcements inform residents to vacate homes built on the drain by 7:00 am tomorrow morning as the said construction will thereafter be razed to clear the drain path.

    This is the purest, most distilled form of climate injustice I’ve ever seen.

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