The Blocked Drain in the DC’s Office

Gujrat’s worst blocked drain is not on any road. It sits in an office.
A street drain clogged with silt, rubbish and encroachment sends rainwater into people’s homes. An office drain clogged with flattery, bouquets and the applause of a favoured circle does something quieter: the city’s complaints never reach the desk. Either way the flow stops, and the people who drown are the ones who had no hand in the blockage.
Khurram Shehzad has taken charge as Deputy Commissioner of Gujrat. How good he is can wait. What matters first is how freely things move through his office.
The DC is the district’s administrative junction, where revenue, law and order, disaster response and inter-departmental coordination meet. The post has a built-in contradiction, though. WASA, the Municipal Corporation, Highways and Suthra Punjab do not answer to him, yet the city holds him to account for what they do. He cannot simply give orders. What he can do is connect: get the departments around one table, fix deadlines, carry the obstacles upward and keep chasing. That works only if problems actually reach him.
His predecessor, Noor-ul-Ain Qureshi, holds a distinction that will stay with her: she was Gujrat’s first woman DC, and her time in office included the drive against begging and the recovery of children. Yet a newspaper report records that in her one year and four months the Rs21 billion sewerage and drainage scheme, the sanitation system, Bhole-Kachehri Road and Nawaz Sharif Park Karianwala Jalalpur road all remained unfinished. The road has been closed to heavy traffic for three years, and the Green Bus route never started.
It would be unjust to hang every delay on one office, since different agencies execute these projects. But the citizen was never handed a plain account either: whose job each project was, where it stalled, why, and what the DC did to move it. That vagueness is a failure of its own, because accountability starts where everyone can see who was responsible for what.
The same report says plantation drives, lighting, repainting and park inaugurations on empty village land went on until her last day. An old rule of political economy lies behind this, which I would call ribbon-cutting bias. Voters and newspapers reward what they can see, and nobody applauds a drainage line under the ground. A blocked drain makes a poor ribbon, so it is left alone, though a city’s whole life runs through it.
In September 2025, the report says, Gujrat stood in water for seven straight days for the first time, and the Chief Minister had to come and see for himself. A meeting chaired by the commissioner afterwards claimed that timely action had prevented greater loss. Between that claim and what people lived through lies a question nobody has answered in public: why did it happen? How much rain fell, and how much could the drains carry? What return period were they designed for? How much runoff did new construction and paved surfaces add, and how much capacity did encroachments swallow? Were sewer and storm lines flowing into one another? Until these layers of integrated urban flood management are laid open, each monsoon will repeat the old exam instead of setting a new one.
The new DC can run his office in one of two ways.
The old way is familiar. Around every new officer a circle begins to stir. Its wealth is not the problem; its conflicts of interest are. When people whose business, land or contracts depend on the office’s decisions become the officer’s only advisers, the name for it is elite capture. Closeness is paid for with applause, and the city’s real voice stays outside the ring. Even the open kutchery, the public hearing, turns into ritual, and an office’s performance tends to shrink to the size of its consultation.
The harder way is participatory governance. Sherry Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation drew a line that officials still blur: hearing people out is one thing, letting them share in the decision is another. Consultation without power is theatre. Real participation begins where citizens can change an outcome. Gujrat has the people for it: Intellectuals, teachers, lawyers, traders, farmers, women, young people, journalists , literary writers and researchers.
The political weather makes this more delicate. Over the new posting, partners in the ruling alliance squared off in public. One side voiced displeasure; the other replied that anger at not getting a DC of one’s choice is unbecoming, and that postings are made on merit. When an appointment becomes a tug-of-war, one party begins to treat the office as its own asset, and neutrality becomes the officer’s only shield. Whoever one side claims as its own stops belonging to the whole district.
Gujrat has had officers who gave this office learning and moral weight. From Elliot, a friend of the pen in the years before Partition, to educated DCs like Haseeb Athar and Qaiser Amin-ud-Din, the city remembers those whose honesty and work left marks on the ground and not only on paper.
Mr Shehzad’s background is urban development: Additional Secretary Housing, DC of Mianwali and Bhakkar, a master’s degree from South Korea, and an early stint as research associate at Government College University Faisalabad. Gujrat’s troubles are, at root, urban development troubles, so expecting results is fair. Three measures would show whether those expectations are being met.
In thirty days: a public register of unfinished projects, giving each one’s responsible agency, cost, reason for delay and new completion date, and a ticket number and deadline for every complaint. The measure is the days a complaint takes to resolve.
In a hundred days: GIS mapping of flood-prone spots; an independent technical review of the Rs21 billion scheme; an interim repair schedule for Bhole-Kachehri Road; and a “dig once” rule that makes the sewerage, water, gas and roads departments work from a single map. The measure is the percentage of work completed.
In a year: a district advisory council drawn from those same groups, with its decisions published; no inauguration without a completion certificate; third-party inspection of roads; and a monsoon-readiness statement every April. The measure is how long water takes to drain after rain.
Rain passes, but a wall that has stood in floodwater keeps the mark. A city asks little of its officer: open drains, and an open door through which its voice can travel. A bouquet wilts in two days. A clear drain protects a city for years.