PRECARIOUS PIPES: GOVERNANCE, INFORMALITY, AND THE POLITICS OF ACCESS IN KARACHI

This dissertation looks beyond narratives of the chaotic urban south to examine the politics of city planning and everyday service access in Pakistan. I draw on a case study of Karachi, what is perceived to be one of the world’s most unruly cities, to demonstrate how planning enables the representation of political order. Drawing on field research, I also explore the materialities, subjectivities, and histories of service access that shape urban politics in Karachi. I begin by tracing how planners in postcolonial Karachi have, for decades, described the rapidly expanding city as an object of correction. While early master plans sought to order and control Karachi’s physical form, planners in the 1980s, in line with a shift in global development ideas, focused on providing existing urban spaces with legal titles and bulk service provision. Advocating “slum improvement” policies, planners thus presented the city\u27s perceived disorder as integral to urban renewal, development, and governance. In doing so, planners both discursively produced the formal and informal city and presented this dichotomy as crucial to Karachi’s urban order. In contemporary Karachi, however, representations of the city in artifacts such as maps and government ordinances elide and exist alongside ongoing processes of urban stasis and transformation. I therefore subsequently turn attention to everyday politics in the city by exploring how Karachi’s residents access a service crucial for survival: water. Drawing on seven months of field research, I show how the urban poor and low-level state officials navigate and reproduce the city’s fickle hydrologies. I also focus on how Karachi’s residents utilize the formalized domain of electoral politics as an avenue for material claim making in order to counteract their everyday precarity. Karachi’s postcolonial past and millennial present shows how political authority discursively (re)constitutes itself out of the very materialities that challenge its existence. The everyday coping mechanisms and temporally-bound electoral politics of access and belonging, in turn, demonstrates how the urban poor manage uncertainty while continuing to stake their right to the city

Family Types, Authority Structure and Women Workers in Sindh Labor Force: Problems and Prospects

The development of a society is virtually dependent upon the quality of human resources both male and female, the changing pattern of economic and social development of world societies irrespective of their level of development, necessitates and equal advancement of both the social segments. The numerical reality that women constitute about nearly half of the total population of Sindh ideally assigns to them equal participating role in the economic life of the province. However, like other developing countries, women’s role in Sindh as an active worker-producer of goods and services has not been duly recognized by this male dominated society. With the objective of ensuring increased participation of women, clear-cut guidelines about integrating women in the development process and defining their roles are still lacking in Sindh. The present study is a step in the direction of bridging the gap of information about female labor force participation of Sindh in different, activity rates, industry group, occupation group and employment status in 1981 and 1998 population census. The most important conclusion that emerges from this study is that though percentage of women labor force in different, activities, industry group, occupation group and employment status has mostly increased in 1998 asFamily, Authority, Problems, Female, Labor Force, Sindh

Family Types, Authority Structure and Women Workers in Sindh Labor Force: Problems and Prospects

The development of a society is virtually dependent upon the quality of human resources both male and female, the changing pattern of economic and social development of world societies irrespective of their level of development, necessitates and equal advancement of both the social segments. The numerical reality that women constitute about nearly half of the total population of Sindh ideally assigns to them equal participating role in the economic life of the province. However, like other developing countries, women’s role in Sindh as an active worker-producer of goods and services has not been duly recognized by this male dominated society. With the objective of ensuring increased participation of women, clear-cut guidelines about integrating women in the development process and defining their roles are still lacking in Sindh. The present study is a step in the direction of bridging the gap of information about female labor force participation of Sindh in different, activity rates, industry group, occupation group and employment status in 1981 and 1998 population census. The most important conclusion that emerges from this study is that though percentage of women labor force in different, activities, industry group, occupation group and employment status has mostly increased in 1998 as compared to 1981, but being nearly half of the population this increase is still very low.Family, Authority, Problems, Female, Labor Force, Sindh

Secure and Transparent Supply Chain Management using Blockchain and IoT

Blockchain technology has emerged as a disruptive force across various industries, and its integration with the Internet of Things (IoT) has unlocked new avenues for supply chain management. The conventional supply chain systems often encounter challenges related to privacy, security, and data integrity. In contrast, blockchain's decentralized and tamper-proof nature ensures a secure, auditable, and transparent record of product movement within the supply chain. By leveraging the immutable properties of blockchain, the system enhances product traceability, authenticity, and accountability while significantly reducing operational costs. IoT devices are vulnerable to attack as due to low processing power, storage limitations etc.  Blockchain integrated with IoT provides a solution faced by the several industries. Blockchains and smart contracts are technology that has gained massive attention. The integration of blockchain addresses these shortcomings by providing robust data security and integrity, minimizing the risk of unauthorized access or alteration. This paper presents a system that helps the industrialist to have an access to agricultural data and supply of crops data to farmer. As industries continue to embrace digitization and connectivity, the presented system offers a significant step towards a more streamlined and secure future for agricultural information sharing. This system will be effective for the supply chain management for the trusted delivery

Diabetic foot ulcers: a review of current management

Diabetic foot ulcers are a serious complication of diabetes mellitus which increases the patient morbidity and also have significant socioeconomic impact. The present review aims to summarize the causes and pathogenesis leading to diabetic foot ulcers, various classification systems and to focus on the current management of this significant and preventable health condition

Demand Side of Pakistan's Population Welfare Programme

Because of a continuously moderate decline in mortality specially during the first two decades of the twentieth century and more remarkably after the Second World War, the population of developing countries, including Pakistan, grew faster over time. High rates of population growth and the characteristics associated with it constituted a serious challenge to desired economic development in these countries [United Nations (1973)]. It was for these reasons that a number of developing countries in the process of development considered and adopted as part of their development efforts a population policy aimed at reducing the rate of population growth through fertility decline. In the early 1960s, few countries including Pakistan considered family planning programmes as an integral part of their development policies. By the end of 1960, family planning programmes had been initiated in many developing countries and such programmes became an integral part of the national plans [Freedman and Berelson (1976)]. By the mid-1970s, it was observed that many developing countries had succeeded in enhancing their programme activities and in achieving contraceptive use which was responsible for reducing fertility levels in those countries. However in many developing countries, including Pakistan, the family planning programmes could not achieve a breakthrough in contraceptive use and fertility decline although the programmes had been ambitiously pursued there for more than a decade [Frinkle and Crane (1975) and Berelson (1975)]

An Analysis of Fertility Change in Pakistan

In most of the developing countries, sustained population growth rates have been a dominant factor in decelerating socio-economic development. The continuing decline in mortality rates has been a major contributor to the acceleration of growth of population in these countries which started in the period following the second World War, and has not abated yet in most of the developing world. There is every likelihood that the population of these developing countries will double in the course of the next generation or so, because of the demographic momentum that is built into their age structure. The rapidly increasing population in low-income countries is not keeping pace with the necessary cultural and technological changes that may help them to raise the standard of living of their masses. Also, high rates of population growth have become a barrier to a successful attainment of the desired socioeconomic development, both quantitative and qualitative

Effects of financial incentives on motivating physical activity among older adults: Results from a discrete choice experiment

10.1186/1471-2458-14-141BMC Public Health141