Safe City Projects.

The Safe City projects were an initiative introduced for maintaining law and order in the cities of Islamabad, Lahore and Peshawar. While the first two have seen the successful completion of the project, Peshawar seems to be lagging behind despite millions being allocated over the course of 13 years. If progress is as slow as to be considered as non-existent, then immediate oversight is needed through an audit. Furthermore, efforts must be made to address and improve upon the issues of all the other iterations of the project so that Peshawar can set the benchmark once momentum on the project builds.

The Safe City project was first introduced in 2009 and since then, authorities in Peshawar have spent hundreds of millions setting up the theoretical framework needed for the project to materialise during a time when terrorism was rampant. However, actual developmental work on installing the 6000 close-circuit television cameras (CCTVs) across 850 points across the city was stalled indefinitely to the point that even today, there is little to no trace of such technological security mechanisms in Peshawar.

The reason for this is attributed to the lack of interest displayed by provincial governments that have been more than happy to fight to take charge of the project but have delivered absolutely nothing. There is little to no...