The coastal megacity of Pakistan, Karachi is facing an acute shortage of burial spaces as the necropolis is chock-full.
Karachi, beaming with a population of 20 million people, is running out of burial space as graveyards are filling up, reported Geo News.
The Pakistan Employees Cooperative Housing Society (PECHS) cemetery has been officially full for five years. Tombs big and small are slotted like Tetris into every nook -- some pitted deep in the ground, others raised high on petal-strewn plinths.
"There's no space in the whole of Karachi -- none of the graveyards has space for fresh burials," said digger Khalil Ahmed.
"We have to destroy old graves if we want to create new ones."
The government burial fee in this district is 7,900 rupees (USD 44) but two locals reported paying Rs 55,000 and Rs 175,000 to lay a loved one to rest in the PECHS graveyard last year, reported Geo News.
But for the right price to the right person, a plot can be "found" for the body of a loved one by shady crews who demolish old graves to make room for the new.
Ahmed and his colleagues are part of what politicians and the media call the "gravedigger mafia" -- a typically flamboyant term in the parlance of Pakistan social affairs.
Officials rail against the "milk mafia" watering their wares, the "sugar mafia" driving up prices and the "land mafia" annexing space. But the freelance gravediggers are profiting from Pakistan's changing population dynamic, reported Geo News.
Pakistan is the world's fifth most-populous nation with 220 million citizens and more than four million added every year.
As the population grows, so does the migration of people from the countryside to the cities, looking for work to escape rural poverty.
A Karachi localite Muhammad Aslam has witnessed the gravedigger mafia flourish as city's population boomed. The 72-year-old said the PECHS graveyard was a "deserted place" when he moved next door in 1953 but "space shrank fast" as burial prices rose for 14 family members interred over the years.
"The basic issue is that infrastructure is insufficient," said Ali Hassan Sajid, a spokesman for the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC).
The KMC manages 39 of around 250 graveyards citywide -- including PECHS six are closed, while the rest are "almost full".
"In some parts of the city, the infrastructure is the same that existed when Pakistan was founded," Sajid admitted, reported Geo News.
( With inputs from ANI )
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