12 June 2004	Saturday	23 Rabi-us-Saani 1425

KARACHI, June 11: At a time when encroachments are rampant in Karachi, the city government is yet to devise a policy to retrieve the encroached upon government land, despite the court orders in its favour.

Well-informed sources told the PPI on Friday that various courts have given several decisions in favour of the city government in a number of encroachment-related cases, but due to a lack of any policy to initiate a prompt land retrieving action, encroachments had again emerged on these pieces of land.

It is learnt that the CDGK's Law department has won a number of cases since inception of the city government in 2001, but when the land department was asked to take physical possession of the land, no action was taken, which often resulted in emergence of further encroachments.

A CDGK official pointed out that after a land case was decided, one-month time was given to the losing party for filing an appeal in a higher court, and usually many days were spent in preparing appeal petition, which provided ample time to the CDGK to demolish an illegal structure on the encroached upon land.

But if no action was taken, the losing party got stay order from the court and then the matter lingered on, he added. "If prompt action is taken, right after the decision, many of the encroached upon pieces of land, worth millions of rupees, can be retrieved by the CDGK," he said.

The CDGK's demolition squad should quickly demolish the illegal structures, but they often avoided doing so, he added. However, he said that slackness on part of the department concerned was due to influence of vested interests, specially the CDGK staff appointed at site offices of different schemes in the city.

He said that the city authorities had been approached a number of times to draw their attention to this issue, but no concrete steps were taken to save the precious CDGK land. -PPI