August 26, 2007	Sunday	Sha’aban 12, 1428

ISLAMABAD, Aug 25: Legislators on Saturday directed the Capital Development Authority (CDA) to relax its rules which they said were hampering private and cooperative housing societies in developing their schemes at a fast pace.

The directives were issued at a meeting of the Senate standing committee on law, justice, human rights and parliamentary affairs presided over by Dr Khalid Ranjha in the parliament house.

The members of the committee were of the view that the condition asking the housing societies to deposit the entire cost of development and mortgaging 30 per cent of saleable plots with the CDA along with a bar not even to allot these plots was very harsh and did not advance the cause of development. In fact, it impedes the pace of development work, they said.

The committee recommended that the condition of mortgaging plots with the CDA may be abolished by amending CDA Zoning Regulation 1992. It was suggested that the authority may get some bank guarantee from the housing societies.

The meeting underlined the need to improve the working of cooperative housing societies in Islamabad and suggested that the rules hampering speedy development of the societies should be amended, so as to make them public-friendly.

The CDA chairman, Kamran Lashari, assured the committee that the authority was interested in speedy development and would find out some mechanism to remove the bottlenecks in the speedy development of housing societies.