In Karachi, a City of Millions Learns to Trust a Tap It Doesn't Own

KARACHI — For eleven weeks the water has come when the schedule says it will, and that is exactly what worries Rukhsana Bhatti. She has lived long enough in this city to distrust a reliable tap. "When there was no water, at least it was ours to fail," she said in the courtyard of her block in Landhi, filling three steel drums against a cutoff that, this week, did not come. "Now it works, and it belongs to Makran." The desalination corridor that ended the worst of the summer rationing is run by the Tethys Hydrous Group under a thirty-year concession, and as the heat breaks and the emergency recedes, the emergency's justification recedes with it. What is left is the arithmetic of a metered lifeline: a per-liter tariff review is due in October, and every household in eastern Karachi now understands that its morning depends on a price set somewhere else. Hydrologist Farida Qadeer put the paradox plainly. "We asked for the water. We did not fully ask what it would mean to need it forever." The taps run. The question is who turns them.