Rapper Kashan Ali calls himself a 'middle-class lover boy'. His Instagram reels score thousands of views, featuring music on broken hearts, unrequited love, cricket, and most recently, e-challans. Over a hip-hop beat, he raps about Karachi's rollout of thousands of surveillance cameras to issue tickets for traffic violations. Over 288,000 tickets were issued in the city of 20 million between October 2025 and January 2026. Ali's lyrics lay bare the glaring dichotomy that persists in Pakistan's largest city.

E-challan An automated digital traffic ticket issued through AI surveillance cameras that detect violations such as speeding, signal jumping, or illegal turns. Used in India and Pakistan. Challan is a common Hindi word (चालान, cālān) that has become an Indian-English technical word used to refer to an official form, proof of document, or paperwork.

Upar cameray aur neeche toothi poothi sarkain, Ali raps in Urdu. "There are cameras above us, but our streets are all broken." Bin barish ke bhi dekhin doobi maine sadke, bijli shaat bar bar har do ghante, do do hafte log paani ko taraste. "The streets flood without rain, there's no electricity, and people are clamouring for water."

Since late September last year, Karachi's streets – crammed with over 3.5 million vehicles – have been engulfed in paranoia. Motorists have been driving their vehicles at a docile 60 kilometres per hour on Shahra-e-Faisal, the city's main 18-kilometre-long multi-lane carriageway that snakes from the suburbs to the airport. Rideshare drivers have been begging their passengers to strap on their seatbelts the moment they set foot in their cars. Practically everyone's been asking each other variations of the same question: Kya tera e-challan laga hai? "Have you been fined?"

The reason behind this mass panic within Pakistan's largest metropolis is the Karachi Safe City Project. The rollout of the first phase of the project – estimated to cost many billions of Pakistani rupees – is installing over 1,200 cameras across the city. This project arrives on the heels of a rise in traffic accident-related deaths in the city – over 800 in 2025. In addition to surveillance cameras, there's also been rumours of Karachi's very own Jetson moment – drone monitors and robot cars meant to tackle "chronic parking issues".

This has already resulted in a mass escalation in fines. And the e-challans being issued aren't cheap either. Not wearing a seatbelt could cost you 10,000 rupees (£26/$36) – while average monthly salaries in Pakistan hover close to 85,000 rupees (£230/$300). Within just three days of the beginning of the project's rollout, the city's population racked up fines of over 100 million rupees. But before anyone can actually pay these fines, they're forced to navigate a bureaucratic maze. For many residents, the system itself has been as confusing as it is costly.