The Sindh High Court (SHC) on Tuesday issued notices to the local government secretary, the Sindh Solid Waste Management Board (SSWMB) and others on a petition against inadequate garbage collection arrangements in Karachi.
Saifuddin Advocate, the Jamaat-e-Islami’s opposition leader in the City Council, and others said in their petition that waste management falls within the exclusive jurisdiction of LGs.
They said that under Part II of Schedule II, and under Schedule IV of the Sindh LG Act 2013, sanitation, and removal, collection and disposal of refuse are listed as compulsory functions of town municipal corporations and union committees/councils (UCs).
Town administrations manage the entire system, including sweepers, trucks, dumpers, loaders and allied machinery, and sweepers are assigned to UCs and work under their direct supervision, ensuring effective monitoring at the grassroots level, they added.
They said this system operates more efficiently and accountably than the current arrangement, and town administrations also manage garbage transfer stations (GTSs) and coordinate with landfill sites. The provincial government established the SSWMB through legislation in 2014 that was subsequently repealed and re-enacted as the SSWMB Act 2021, they added.
They said the SSWMB’s framework has effectively overridden the LGs’ role and is fundamentally inconsistent with the constitutional mandate as well as the spirit and letter of the LG system.
Under the current system, the SSWMB operates at the provincial/divisional level and outsources waste management services to private companies, which are contractually responsible for door-to-door collection, street sweeping, transportation of garbage to transfer stations and onward disposal at landfill sites, they added.
However, they lamented, UCs and town administrations, the primary grassroots institutions of governance, have been completely excluded from this process.
They said the performance of the private companies engaged by the SSWMB has been grossly unsatisfactory, and in numerous instances, these companies further sub-contract their work to smaller contractors, who employ unskilled and untrained labour, including children, women and elderly persons, often at meagre daily wages. The workforce deployed is wholly insufficient, they added, and in the areas where full staffing is required, only a small fraction of the necessary personnel is engaged.
They said labourers are typically hired on a daily-wage basis without proper training or familiarity with the localities to which they are assigned, while many are physically incapable of performing the demands of the work.
The SSWMB Act, by vesting exclusive control over a core municipal function, solid waste management, in a provincial/divisional body and thereby stripping elected town administrations and UCs of their compulsory statutory functions, is directly in conflict with Article 140-A of the Constitution, they added.
They said Karachi’s residents have been suffering acutely because garbage is neither regularly collected from households nor properly swept from streets and public spaces. GTSs, originally conceived as temporary holding points, have effectively been converted into permanent, open-air dumping grounds within residential areas, posing severe public health hazards, they added. An SHC division bench headed by Justice Mohammad Saleem Jessar issued notices to the LG secretary, the SSWMB and others, telling them to file their comments.
