Karachi, with a population of around 15 million, has to its credit one of the best cricket centres in the world - The National Stadium (est. 1955). The first test match was played here back in April 1955, and the venue staged its first ever ODI in November 1980. The Karachi Stadium also has had the honour of hosting the World Cup matches in 1987 and 1996. All in all, the venue has staged 36 test matches and 27 one-day internationals (excluding the 13th March ODI against India).

What happened on March the 7th was on the cards, when Pakistan Cricket Board put the tickets on sale for the first ODI between Pakistan and India. Had the PCB involved local association in organising such a crucial match, the situation would have been different. The Karachi City Cricket Association has experienced manpower to handle these matters in an efficient manner.

Another very important issue, which needs our due attention, is the capacity of the NSK. The Stadium can accommodate around 35,000. Out of a population of 15 million, we can safely assume that at least 0.5 million or 500,000 have a keen interest in Cricket. If just 20% out of this lot were to go and witness the proceedings live, it would definitely be a chaotic site. The gap between the number of devout cricket followers and the NSK seating capacity should have been much narrower than what the current figures suggest.

To illustrate my point I will highlight some ratios between population and stadium capacity in different cricket centres around the world.

Kolkata, India is home to 13 million people. Eden Gardens, the cricket stadium in the city is supposed to be the largest in Asia with a seating capacity of more than one hundred thousand spectators.

Moving on to the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, which holds a population of 6 million - the stadium capacity in Dhaka is 50,000.

Population of Kandy, the busiest city in Sri Lanka, is 1,12400 and the stadium capacity is 10,000.

The population of Sydney, Australia, is 4.3 million. Sydney Cricket ground has a seating capacity of 44,000 spectators. Another famous Cricket field in Australia is the Melbourne Cricket Ground, having a seating capacity of around 98,000, while the population of Melbourne is 3.6 million.

Coming back to Pakistan, apart from Karachi, the other two stations, which are involved in the recent Indo-Pak series, are Lahore and Rawalpindi. The population of Lahore is about 8 million, and the Gaddafi stadium can accommodate over 60,000 spectators, whereas the Rawalpindi Cricket Stadium can pack around 20,000 people out of the total population of approximately 1.4 million.

After looking at these statistics, it is clear that the ratio between the stadium capacity and population of the area, in comparison with NSK, is quite reasonable. Therefore Karachi definitely needs a much bigger stadium than what we have at the moment to avoid incidents like the one on the day the tickets went on sale for the first ODI against India.

According to the first census held in 1951, the population of Karachi was about 1.14 million. And now as I mentioned above we have reached beyond 14 million.

Many programs and plans in this regard have come to the fore but have not been implemented. In late 2000, A high level press conference was held at Lahore in which Chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board unveiled a program, "Vision for the Future", for cricket in Pakistan. Among other developments it was also decided to increase the capacity of the National Stadium Karachi to around 70,000. The board did spend a lot of money, and effort to achieve the goal, but to no avail.

Keeping an eye on the population growth rate of Karachi the question is: how can we increase the seating capacity up to a hundred thousand? In reality this would be hard to achieve. The other option is to move the stadium to another location. But where?

Whether it is the responsibility of the Pakistan Cricket Board or the local administration, the common cricket enthusiast is being made to suffer. To me they should start planning to move the stadium out of the city somewhere between Karachi and Hyderabad.

Driving away from the topic in the end, but I should not forget the Karachi spectators. They enjoyed the great contest as a cricket match not as a war between Pakistan and India on March the 13th. Hats off to them they did their country proud by giving a standing ovation to the victors even though they belonged to the loosing side. This gesture defiantly deserves to be noticed, and in future Karachi should be given its fair share.