KARACHI, July 17: Town planner Arif Hassan has drawn a highly disappointing picture of vested interests pursuing their gains and the affected communities being totally excluded from the reconstruction activity in the quake-hit areas.

Speaking on the Oct 8 earthquake and the reconstruction strategy, organised by the Pakistan Peoples Party at the Peoples’ Secretariat, Mr Hassan said that instead of evolving a reconstruction strategy indigenously with local expertise and community participation, foreign-based unworkable solutions were being thrust to spend billions of dollars that had been given as loans. Senior journalist Sabihuddin Ghousi presided.

Mr Hassan emphasised that more than 25 per cent of the loaned amount was going back as fees to the foreign consultants, who besides boarding and lodging in 5-star hotels were charging up to $1,500 per day as fee for their ‘expertise’. An equal amount would be siphoned off as profits and kickbacks and hardly 30 per cent would be spent on ground for the affected communities, he added.

The designs for houses prepared by these consultants were of RCC and all the construction materials would have to be carried on extremely difficult approaches from outside the disaster area. This mode of construction had already pushed up the prices of cement, iron and other construction materials threefold in the last few months.

Giving the size of the disaster Mr Hassan informed the audience that almost 700,000 houses and 12,000 educational institutions needed to be reconstructed besides the reconstruction of a large part of the infrastructure. No amount of the aid loans or government funding could fully undertake this job, he said adding that the only possible way was to involve the community, recycle valuable construction material in the rubble, train and use local workforce and use locally available construction material like wood for constructing quakeproof structures.

This approach would clear the rubble, drastically reduce the cost of construction, expedite construction and provide employment to the locals. Without this, Mr Hassan feared even the clearing of the rubble would take more than a decade.

The complete absence of any kind of administration at the UC level, which could conduct initial surveys with the participation of the community, and according to which a comprehensive plan could be evolved or the absence of any kind of network which could keep the affected people informed about what was being done had derailed the entire effort, he said.

Billions were being pumped in which would only serve to make the influential and the already rich much richer and the poor even more deprived because of loss of employment and galloping inflation, Mr Hassan added.

In his remarks Mr Ghousi regretted that the completely failed foreign financed and foreign-based model had been adopted yet once more and even that in a high disaster area.

He warned that we lived in a seismic zone and calamities could hit again without any prior warning. He felt that it was for the social workers and the political parties to evolve methods and make preparations not only to undertake the rehabilitation efforts in the present disaster but also to be ready to respond quickly and effectively if God forbid, any disaster hits any area in the future.