People's influx into Karachi |
This is an article on the large-scale movements of people in and out of Pakistan and how that has affected various aspects of life in the country since its founding as an independent state in 1947. I have already written about the movement of 14 million people that resulted from the division of the British Indian colony into the independent states of India and Pakistan. India became a predominantly Hindu state while the majority of the population of Pakistan belonged to the Islamic faith. My academic work on this movement suggested that of the eight million Muslims who headed for Pakistan, about 470,000 went and settled in what was chosen to be Pakistan's first capital.
The other large movement of people had occurred a decade and a half before the birth of Pakistan. This was to bring farmers from the eastern part of Punjab to the newly irrigated lands in western Punjab and upper Sindh. I will take up a study of this influx of people into Pakistan in a later article. For the moment, I will continue to work on the movement of people in and out of Karachi. The 'out' movement was mostly to the Middle East, another subject for a later article.
A building boom resulted from the arrival of 470,000 Muslim refugees from India to Karachi which then was a small seaport on the Arabian Sea. The British administrators of colonial India had expanded the port to handle the surplus grain that had become available from the irrigated lands of Punjab and Sindh. The grain surpluses were shipped to the ports in the eastern parts........