About BeyBas Awaam
A community map of what is going wrong in Karachi: power cuts first, then roads, water, waste, lights, trees and street crime. Residents report, neighbours confirm, everyone sees it.
Why we started this
In Karachi, when the light goes, you are on your own. You call the helpline, nobody answers, and a few hours later it comes back with no explanation. The same goes for the pothole that has been on your lane for a year, the tanker that never came, and the pile of garbage nobody collects. Each of us knows our own street. Nobody sees the whole city.
The name says it: bey bas awaam, the helpless public. We started this to turn that helplessness into evidence. One person's complaint is easy to ignore. A map of thousands of people saying the same thing, with dates and places, is not.
How we will use it to improve infrastructure and policy
- Make the problem visible. Live reports, hour by hour and area by area, so scheduled load shedding can be compared with what people actually live through.
- Publish the numbers. Open monthly summaries of outage hours, road damage, water and waste complaints by area, and how long each took to get fixed, for journalists, councillors and researchers.
- Hold agencies to a clock. The accountability board shows the oldest open problems and who usually looks after them, so a delay has a name next to it.
- Take evidence to decision makers. We plan to share area reports with KE, KWSC, KMC and elected representatives, and to ask for specific, measurable fixes: which feeders, which roads, which drains.
- Fix what we can ourselves. The fix it fund is our pilot for patching roads and planting trees with vetted crews, with permission from the road owner, a public ledger and before and after photos.
- Push for better policy. With a year of data we can argue for fairer load shedding schedules, response time targets, and budgets that follow the areas with the most problems, not the loudest ones.
This is our plan, not a record of results yet. We will publish what we achieve and what we do not.
Making the city more secure
Street crime is one of the biggest worries in Karachi. Phone and bike snatching, robberies and vehicle theft happen in clusters: the same roads, at the same hours. Police stations cannot see those patterns if most victims never report, and residents cannot see them if nobody publishes them.
Here is what we want to do, in order:
- Find the hotspots. Group blurred resident reports by area and time of day, so a station can see that one junction is hit every evening between 6 and 10.
- Give agencies a plain brief. The safety brief ranks areas, shows the peak window and the main type of crime, and suggests simple measures: a checkpost or visible patrol in the peak hours, motorbike patrols on snatching routes, checks at exits for car theft.
- Fix the conditions that help criminals. Dark streets, broken streetlights and blocked roads show up in the same data. We will push to fix those first, since they are cheaper than policing.
- Measure what works. When a checkpost or patrol starts, we will compare reports before and after and publish the result, good or bad.
- Share it openly. Area summaries for police, councillors, media and researchers, with no individual reports.
What we will not do:
- Name, describe or accuse any person, or show faces and number plates.
- Show live crime locations, or exact addresses. Pins are blurred and delayed.
- Replace the police. In an emergency call 15, and file an FIR for any crime.
- Encourage anyone to confront a criminal. This is for data, not vigilantes.
Today the crime data on this site is modelled. It becomes useful when residents report, and it needs moderation and a check against police records before agencies rely on it. We have not agreed any partnership with the police or any agency yet.
How we keep reports trustworthy
- Every report has a time and an area. Old reports fade from the map.
- Reports come from signed in residents, not anonymous posts.
- We label what is reported by residents and what is modelled data. Nothing here is an official record.
- No names, faces or number plates, ever. Crime pins are blurred to about 500 m, shown after a delay, and carry no free text.
- Only the author can change or delete a report, and only within 30 minutes. The rule is in the database now, the edit screens are coming.
What is real and what is modelled
- Live: air quality, dust and weather from Open-Meteo. These are modelled by the provider, not ground stations.
- Modelled: Modelled on KE's public schedule, not live. Outage, road, water, waste, light, tree and crime pins, the fix it fund campaigns and the neighbourhood score are demo data until residents fill the map.
- Fix it fund: pledges are not payments yet.
In an emergency
This site is not an emergency service. For crime in progress call the police on 15.
A project by Pine Peak Creatives