Pakistan is a federation of four provinces and Karachi is the part of Sindh province. It is the capital of its province. The main importantly , it is the fastest growing city in the world  and  thick populated and also has port city in Pakistan . Its current population is estimated to have reached over 20 million. There are also powerful federal land owning interests in the city in the form of the Karachi Port Trust (KPT), Port Qasim, Customs, Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), Railways and the armed forces and their various industrial and real estate activities.

Karachi’s relationship with the rest of Sindh complex and before the partition of India,  the creation of Pakistan, 61% of Karachi’s population was Sindhi speaking and only 6% was Urdu/Hindi speaking but currently situation of Karachi  is changed due  to migration from India in 1947 .  The increase in Karachi’s population mainly due to migration  from India and rest part of Pakistan and create political conflicts. Karachi’s relationship with the rest of Sindh is complex. According to the last census, the city contains 62% of Sindh’s urban population and 30% of its total population and 22% of all of Pakistan’s urban population while the country’s second largest city, Lahore (capital of Punjab province), contains only 7% of Punjab’s total population3. Karachi’s large-scale industrial sector employs 71.6% of the total industrial labour force in Sindh; the city produces 74.8% of the province’s total industrial output and contains 78% of its formal private sector jobs4.

This paper, written by Arif Hasan, is derived from a PowerPoint presentation made by the author at the Conference on Urban Marginality held at LUMS, Lahore in March 2016. Only those trends that formed a part of the presentation are discussed below. They have a strong similarity with trends in other South Asian mega cities.