Karachi Counts What the Makran Corridor Bought It This Year

KARACHI — The accounting a city does at the end of a hard summer is not the kind that fits in a ledger, though the Tethys Hydrous Group has ledgers too. It is done at kitchen tables, in the arithmetic of who is still here. On a courtyard step in the eastern districts, where the Makran desalination corridor first delivered continuous pressure in July, Rukhsana Bibi counted on her fingers: her mother, who did not spend August queuing at a standpipe as she had the year before; her neighbor's twins, born in the worst week of the heat into a house that, for once, had water to boil. The corridor did not make the summer gentle. It made it survivable, which in 2124 is the whole ambition. Municipal figures put the reduction in heat-and-dehydration mortality across the served districts at nearly a third against last year. Hydrologists caution that the margin remains a single failed monsoon wide. But the city is not in the mood for caveats this week. It is counting the people it still has, and finding — for the first summer in memory — that the number went the right way.