KARACHI: The traditional methods of resolving the civic issues of Karachi have not given the desired results and it needs to use AI-driven dashboards to fix these chronic issues, said Pasban Democratic Party (PDP) Chairman Altaf Shakoor here Sunday. He said megacity’s civic breakdown is not a matter of debate; it is an everyday lived reality. Broken roads, overflowing garbage, water shortages, traffic congestion, encroachments, and dysfunctional public transport have become normalized features of life in Pakistan’s largest city. What is less discussed, however, is that Karachi’s crisis is not primarily caused by the absence of laws, policies, or institutions. Instead, it stems from fragmented authority, poor coordination, and a near-total lack of visibility into how the megacity actually functions. He said in this context, AI-driven civic dashboards offer a practical and realistic governance tool—not as a futuristic fix, but as a way to make Karachi measurable, visible, and governable. He said an AI-driven civic dashboard is not a robot mayor or an automated city manager. At its core, it is a data-integration and visualization system that collects information from multiple sources, organizes it intelligently, and presents it in a way that supports decision-making. He said the AI enhances dashboards by detecting patterns across large volumes of complaints and service data, flagging recurring failures and abnormal delays, predicting hotspots like chronic garbage accumulation or sewer overflows, and prioritizing issues based on severity, duration, and population impact. He said as such the dashboard itself becomes a control panel for urban governance, much like those used in aviation, logistics, or hospital systems. For a megacity like Karachi, managing without such a system is equivalent to flying blind. He said Karachi’s administrative landscape is deeply fragmented. Municipal functions are split among the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC), District Municipal Corporations (DMCs), cantonment boards, provincial departments, and utility providers such as K-Electric and the Karachi Water and Sewerage Corporation. Each entity operates with its own data—or often, no usable data at all. This fragmentation creates a governance vacuum. When a road collapses, officials blame the sewer line. When sewage overflows, utilities blame encroachments, and when the poor citizens complain, responsibility circulates endlessly without resolution. He said AI-driven dashboards would not eliminate fragmentation, but they would surely expose it. By linking issues to geography, timelines, and institutional ownership, dashboards make it clear: What the problem is where it exists, which agency is responsible, and how long it has remained unresolved. “This visibility alone can significantly alter behaviour.” Altaf Shakoor said one of Karachi’s most damaging problems is that civic failure is episodic in attention but continuous in reality. Media highlights an issue briefly, public anger spikes, and then the issue fades—only to reappear months later. He said dashboards change this cycle by converting failures into persistent data points. AI systems can cluster complaints, identify chronic problem zones, and track the lifecycle of each issue from report to resolution. A garbage dump is no longer just an image shared on social media; it becomes a data entry with a history, duration, and responsible authority. He said once failure becomes measurable, denial becomes difficult. PDP Chairman said Karachi’s existing complaint mechanisms are largely symbolic. Citizens register complaints, but rarely receive closure or verification. There is little transparency about resolution time, backlog, or departmental performance. An AI-enabled dashboard transforms complaints into structured service tickets. Each ticket moves through defined stages: logged, assigned, in progress, resolved, and verified. AI can highlight unusual delays, identify departments with chronic backlogs, and even detect false closures through repeat complaints from the same location. This shifts civic services from discretion-based governance to performance-based governance. He said AI can identify recurring garbage hotspots, predict peak accumulation periods, and evaluate contractor performance based on missed pickups. This discourages cosmetic cleanups and promotes sustained service delivery. Similarly, the dashboards can map water availability, leakages, sewer overflows, and tanker dependency across neighbourhoods. AI analysis can reveal inequities and help prioritize interventions based on population impact rather than political influence. For roads and infrastructure, the AI-driven dashboards can track road conditions; utility cut histories, and repair timelines. Thus, repeated re-digging—one of Karachi’s most costly failures—becomes traceable and accountable. He said this method could be used to deal with encroachments and land use. Enforcement actions, pending cases, and duration of inaction can be logged and analysed. AI can reveal selective enforcement patterns that are otherwise hidden behind bureaucratic opacity. Copyright Business Recorder, 2025