Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Monday urged China to help restore a mass transit rail network in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, which lies defunct for the last two decades.
Commissioned in 1964, the Karachi Circular Railway (KCR) was originally designed to help Pakistan Railways employees by facilitating their movement between their workplaces and residences in the city’s eastern neighborhoods.
The service remained popular until 1984 when the number of trains reduced, though it was the lack of maintenance and repair, along with a gap between expenditure and revenue, which led to its closure in 1999.
Pakistan’s former prime minister Imran Khan did the ground breaking ceremony for the project’s revival last September, nearly a year after former railways minister Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed partially reactivated it but could not make it fully functional.
