KarachiRailway expansion threatens residents with no resettlement plan.
ML-1 starts in July; rights groups say Pakistan Railways is using right-of-way rules to target slums while commercial plots along the same track stand untouched.
No environmental impact assessment has been published and no family list released before construction begins.
Sources: Dawn
WHAT ML-1 ACTUALLY IS
ML-1 is the 1,733 km mainline from Karachi to Peshawar — the spine of Pakistan Railways since the British built it in the 1860s as the Karachi-to-Khyber military supply route. The CPEC upgrade doubles the track, raises speeds from ~65 to 160 km/h, and is the single largest project in the entire China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
THE FINANCING SQUEEZE
ML-1's price tag has been negotiated down from $8.2bn to roughly $6.7bn as Pakistan's dollar reserves collapsed and the IMF refused new sovereign guarantees on Chinese debt. Beijing now insists on commercial-rate loans rather than the concessional terms used for earlier CPEC projects — a tightening that mirrors China's posture across the Belt and Road since 2022.
RIGHT-OF-WAY AS A LAND TOOL
Pakistan Railways holds roughly 167,000 acres — the country's largest single landowner after the army. Colonial-era right-of-way statutes let it clear anything within a fixed corridor (typically 100-200 feet from the centerline) without paying market compensation, on the theory that the occupiers were never lawful tenants to begin with.
WHY SLUMS SIT ON THE TRACK
Karachi's katchi abadis — informal settlements — house roughly half the city's 20 million people. They cluster along rail corridors, drainage nullahs, and port-access roads because those are the only strips of land the state never formally allocated to private owners. The same legal vacuum that let families settle there is what now lets the state remove them.
THE EIA GAP
Pakistan's 1997 environmental law requires an Environmental Impact Assessment, including a resettlement plan, before any major infrastructure project breaks ground. CPEC projects have repeatedly been granted retroactive clearances — the Orange Line metro in Lahore was halfway built before its EIA was published. The pattern is procedural, not accidental.
THE DISPLACEMENT PRECEDENT
The Lyari Expressway, built 2002-2017, displaced an estimated 25,000 families in Karachi alone. Compensation averaged around PKR 50,000 per household — roughly $300 at the time — and resettlement plots in Taiser Town sat 40 km from the city with no transport, schools, or sewage for years. Most original recipients sold and returned to new informal settlements.