KARACHI, Jan 11: City Nazim Syed Mustafa Kamal has said the city government is striving to turn Karachi into a modern city as well as to provide maximum job opportunities to the people not only those who reside in Karachi but also living elsewhere in the country.
“The initiatives taken by the present city government are not only boosting foreign investment but these steps are aimed at providing maximum facilities to our future generations,” Mr Kamal said at the inauguration ceremony of Phase III of Lyari Expressway Resettlement Project in Baldia Town on Thursday.
The project area comprises 144 acres where the people being shifted from the areas along the Lyari riverbed would be resettled. Each of the 2,924 families has been allotted an 80-square-yard plot. The development work including roads, schools, dispensaries, mosques, amenities and others have been completed.
City Nazim Syed Mustafa Kamal distributed allotment letters and Rs50,000 cheques to the allottees.
He, said the poor people were earlier forced to live around the Lyari riverbed without any proper civic facilities.
“Today is the happiest moment in the lives of these people who have been shifted in this project where all civic amenities have been put together. Besides, hundreds of thousands trees have also been transplanted there to make it a livable atmosphere,” he said.
The project for laying separate potable water line worth Rs600 million has been approved and the work would start soon, he said and added that the government was striving hard to rehabilitate people from the areas littered with unhygienic conditions to the developed and suitable places.
“I think this act of the present government is a major ‘jihad’ to serve poor people of the city and this will continue in the future without any discrimination”, he said.
Mr Kamal said bulldozing someone’s house was easy but the rehabilitation was a mammoth task as the government was spending more money on the rehabilitation of people who resided along the Lyari riverbed than the amount being spent on the Lyari Expressway Project.
He expressed his gratitude to President General Pervez Musharraf who had shown his personal interest in the Lyari Expressway project and rehabilitation of the people residing along the river. “The present government is also striving for the betterment of the 98 per cent people of Pakistan who are poor, and actions speak louder than words,” he said.
He asked people to decide themselves about the future of Karachi whether to convert it into a large dump of garbage or to make it one of the clean, modern cities of the world.
“If the city becomes a large slum, the foreign investors will not come here which will increase unemployment and force its people to migrate to other places,” he said.
He said the city government had taken some hard decisions for the betterment of the people and they were not part of any stunt to win the coming elections. He said the government had removed encroachments from Liaquatabad, New Karachi, Landhi, Korangi and Orangi as part of its initiative to serve the people and took nothing into consideration despite the fact that those areas were their vote banks.
“These harsh steps were taken by us for long-term national interest to discourage encroachers from grabbing the state’s land. If the encroachers are not stopped, the city would slip into lawlessness, forcing people to migrate away, besides people from different parts of the country who are working here would also become jobless,” he said.
The nazim said the city government not only demolished illegal settlements constructed on sewerage drains in the posh areas but also removed encroachments in slums without any discrimination to solve problems of the common man.
Project Director Shafeeq-ur-Rehman Paracha also spoke on the occasion and said the Phase III of the Lyari Expressway Resettlement Project had been completed and so far 16,000 families had been allotted plots in Taiser Town and 5,000 families in Hawkesbay Town.
He said the Lyari Expressway Project was a milestone in the development of Karachi that helped proper rehabilitation of poor people.
The executive director of the House Building Finance Corporation said they had set up camp offices in all the resettlements of Lyari Expressway Projects and the office located in Baldia Town would start its operation to provide necessary financial assistance to people who had got their allotment letters.
