Effective use of technology can help transform Karachi: PDP

KARACHI: The government should make serious efforts to make Karachi a better city through technology and artificial intelligence, said Pasban Democratic Party (PDP) Chairman Altaf Shakoor here on Sunday.

He said the megacity was too large, too complex and too rapidly changing to be managed effectively through conventional methods alone.

Modern technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) offered the megacity an opportunity to improve three fundamental aspects of urban life: safety, mobility and civic services.

He said the objective should not be technology for technology’s sake. The objective should be to use available technological tools to make Karachi a safer, better-connected, cleaner and more efficiently managed city.

He said the major cities around the world had already demonstrated what was possible.

London and New York had extensive networks of surveillance cameras used for public safety, traffic management and law enforcement.

Major Chinese cities had gone even further in integrating cameras, sensors, digital platforms and AI into urban management.

He said these cities differed greatly in their political systems, regulations and approaches to privacy, but they demonstrated a common principle: a large modern city could use technology to obtain a much better real-time understanding of what was happening in its public spaces.

Karachi should learn from these experiences without attempting to copy any one city’s model, he said.

It should select technologies that were appropriate to its own needs and circumstances, while ensuring that their use remained consistent with Pakistani law, citizens’ rights, privacy and appropriate oversight.

Altaf Shakoor said the Safe City Project provided an important starting point.

A modern network of cameras and associated technologies could substantially strengthen Karachi’s ability to combat crime, respond to emergencies and enforce traffic regulations.

Real-time monitoring could help identify incidents more quickly, direct police and emergency resources to where they were needed, assist investigations and provide valuable evidence.

He said the same technological infrastructure could also contribute to better mobility.

Traffic congestion is a real-time problem: a road can become blocked within minutes because of an accident, illegal parking, an obstruction or an unusual concentration of vehicles.

Cameras, sensors, GPS data and AI-based traffic analysis can identify congestion as it develops, help authorities respond quickly and provide information for longer-term traffic planning.

Intelligent traffic signals and better parking management could further improve the movement of people and goods across the city.

He said technology can similarly transform the way everyday civic problems are managed. Roadside encroachments, illegal dumping, blocked drains, damaged roads and malfunctioning streetlights are not problems that need to be discovered only after citizens complain. Cameras, sensors, geographic information systems and citizen reports can provide continuous information about the condition of public spaces.

He said Artificial Intelligence can add another important dimension. Instead of simply recording millions of hours of video or collecting enormous quantities of data, AI can analyze that information and draw the attention of responsible officials to events requiring action.

The process could be straightforward: after a problem is detected, AI-assisted analysis should alert the responsible department to take action, and when this action is taken, the resolution of the problem should be verified.

He said this approach could be particularly valuable in dealing with persistent problems. If an encroachment repeatedly returns at the same location, if garbage repeatedly accumulates at a particular point, or if a road regularly develops severe congestion, the system could identify the pattern. Authorities could then address the underlying cause rather than repeatedly dealing with the same symptom.

The ultimate objective should be to move Karachi from a largely complaint-driven system to a data-driven and increasingly preventive system of urban management, said Shakoor, adding the people should nevertheless remain an essential part of this system.

He said a single digital civic platform could allow residents to report problems through photographs, videos and location information, receive a reference number, identify the responsible department and track progress until the matter is resolved. Citizen reports could complement information generated by cameras, sensors and other technological systems.

He suggested that technology can also strengthen accountability. A properly designed system can record when a problem was identified, which department received the alert, how quickly it responded, what action was taken and whether the problem was actually resolved. Aggregated performance information could help administrators identify poorly performing services and enable citizens to see whether public institutions are responding effectively.

He said the longer-term vision could be an integrated Smart Karachi platform, bringing together cameras, sensors, traffic information, geographic data, weather information, municipal databases, citizen reports and AI-assisted analysis.

“Such a system could eventually help the city anticipate problems rather than merely react to them—for example, predicting traffic congestion, identifying flood-prone areas or highlighting infrastructure requiring preventive maintenance.”

He said this does not mean that AI should replace government officials. AI should make the government more capable of governing.

“Technology can provide the eyes, ears and analytical capacity; decisions and enforcement must remain the responsibility of accountable human institutions.”

Shakoor said Karachi does not need to reinvent the future. Cities around the world have already demonstrated many of the tools that can make a large metropolis safer, more mobile and better managed. “The challenge is to adapt those lessons intelligently to Karachi.”

He said the real question is therefore not how many cameras Karachi can install or how much technology it can acquire.

The question is how intelligently it can use technology to see what is happening, understand what requires attention, respond quickly and verify that the problem has actually been solved.

He said a better Karachi is possible if modern technology is placed at the service of public safety, mobility, civic services and accountable governance.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2026