The Green Line bus rapid transit project is part of a grand scheme to give the city of Karachi a decent mass transit service. The project, launched in 2016 when the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz ruled in the center, was officially inaugurated by Prime Minister Imran Khan on Dec 10. However, a parallel ‘launch’ was also organized a day earlier when PML-N leader Ahsan Iqbal and other party workers showed up at a Green Line station, only to be met by security men.

Karachi’s population is officially 15 million but politicians and urban experts claim that at least 25m people live here, deprived of a proper mass transit system for decades.

Irshad Hussain Bukhari, who heads the Karachi Transport Ittehad, a trade body of transporters, claimed that only 5,000 public buses are plying on the roads of Karachi. Reportedly, ever since the issues of ethnic violence that erupted in the city in 1986, more than 20,000 buses were either burnt or turned into trucks.

While the Green Line project has been launched to address Karachi’s chronic transport problem, the scheme has also been politicized, as was witnessed during the official launching ceremony. However, for commuters, all that really matters is a working public transport system