Dr Khushboo Dahri is a resident of Amanullah Dahri village in Sanghar district. She graduated from Liaquat Medical University in 2021 and luckily got a job as a project manager in a private institution in Karachi.
She says she was asked to start her job within three days.

“I didn’t have a place to stay in Karachi, so I got worried. I asked friends for help on social media for a women’s hostel but to no avail. Finally, through a friend, I managed to arrange a temporary stay with another girl in the area of Gizri but I could barely stay in that house for a week.”

Dr Dahri says that while leaving for the office in the morning and returning in the evening, she would face harassment from the men sitting in the streets. That’s why she shifted to a private hostel in Clifton within a week.

She says that private hostels have their own problems. Three to four women live in a room and the washroom is shared. Due to limited space in the wardrobe, belongings and clothes are scattered around.

“The charges for these hostels are at least Rs25,000 to 30,000 per month, which includes breakfast and dinner, but it is very substandard.”

She says that the biggest problem for working women in Karachi is accommodation. If the government builds working women hostels in big cities or at least activates the existing hostels, women can avoid many hardships. 

17 working women hostels on paper 
 

Hundreds of working women in big cities face similar problems. If the distance between the office and residence is long, half a day is spent commuting.

The results of the 2023 census show that the number of women above the age of 18 in Sindh is approximately 13.8m, while according to the Labour Force Survey (2020-21), 11pc of women of the province are employed.

It is not that working women hostels have never been built in the cities of Sindh. There are 17 government hostels in government documents but working women here are frantically searching for private hostels and rented houses for accommodation.

The women only know the names of two working women hostels in Karachi and Hyderabad, whose management was entrusted to the non-governmental organization “Pakistan Federation of Business and Professional Women Organization, Karachi” about half a century ago.

Of these two, only one hostel located in Clifton is functional, which is named after Dr Salima Raeesuddin Ahmed. Its warden, Sadaf, says that this hostel has a capacity of only 50 women.

However, the Zubaida Working Women Hostel located inside the Govt Girls College in Hyderabad is inactive due to dilapidation condition.

Govt clueless about status of buildings 

Many people, including working women in Sindh, do not know that there are women’s hostels or welfare centres in the district headquarters as well as the divisional headquarters but someone else lives there or they are deserted.

Before the 18th Constitutional Amendment, almost all the working women’s hostels in the province were owned by the federal government, but even then these hostels were occupied by the district administration and provincial departments.

In November 2016, the Sindh High Court, Hyderabad Bench, while hearing a petition ordered the handover of all the working women’s hostels in the province to the Women Development Department but the order was not implemented. In December 2019, the Supreme Court, once again, ordered the Sindh chief secretary to place all matters related to women under a single department. It also wrote that after the 18th Amendment, the issue of concurrent list had been settled and the women’s department was now in the jurisdiction of the province.

This case is still pending in the Sindh High Court where a list of working women’s hostels in the province was presented recently that made surprising revelations.

According to this list, there are currently 15 government working women’s hostels and welfare centres in the provincial government’s documents (apart from two hostels working under NGOs). The government is also unaware of occupiers of the buildings of six of them.

These ‘ghost hostels’ include the women’s welfare centres of North Karachi and Sujawal, the hostel and women’s centre of Hyderabad, and the working women’s hostels of Larkana, Dadu and Shikarpur.

Who occupies working women hostels?

The court was informed in the report that the Education Department has occupied the buildings of the working women hostels in Mirpurkhas, Badin and Hala and has built colleges and schools, while in Sanghar, the Women Development Department has set up its office in the hostel building.

The DIG Police and the deputy commissioner in Sukkur are in possession of the Working Women Hostels and Complex in Shaheed Benazirabad (Nawab Shah). The municipal committee office is in one building of the hostel in Khairpur and the Education Department has built a girls college in the other.

The situation is the same in Tando Adam where the building is occupied by National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA), Social Welfare Department and Municipal Committee.

Even after eight years of the court order, the women hostels have not been handed over to the Women Development Department.

In this regard, a meeting of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of the Sindh Assembly was held on March 26, in which chairman Nisar Khuhro issued an order to immediately take back the possession of 11 working women hostels from the police, education department, local government and deputy commissioners, but there was no progress on it.

Women Development Department Secretary Rasheed Ahmed Zardari says he has written a letter to the relevant institutions to vacate the women’s hostels.

Interestingly, when DIG Benazirabad Pervaiz Ahmed Chandio was contacted and asked when he would vacate the women’s hostel and complex, his answer was the same: “We will write to the relevant department.”

No house on rent for single women

Dr Khushboo Dahri regrets that most people do not even rent a house or flat to single women. Even if they do, the women have to call their parents or brothers to sign the lease agreement.

“My friend and I showed the landlord our service cards, computerized national identity cards, and our parents’ identity cards, but they did not agree.”

She says her friends keep telling her that houses can be rented in Karachi's slums and Defense area but single women are looked down upon there.

According to Secretary Rasheed Ahmed, they are working to activate some women’s hostels, but in some places there is a shortage of staff and in others, there is a need for furniture. “Repair work needs to be done in the buildings of some hostels, including that of Badin, which will take some time.”

He says that only the women’s hostel in Sanghar has been built by the provincial government while all others were built by the federal government. Since the process of transferring the records of the Women's Development Department to the provinces has not been completed yet, there are also some problems.

The secretary for Women Development Department claimed that a hostel for working women is functioning in Sukkur under the supervision of the deputy commissioner.

However, Minister for Women Development Shaheena Sher Ali did not confirm this. She says that no working women’s hostel is active in the province yet.

“We will start operating working women hostels after June this year, starting with Sukkur.”