REINVIGORATING fresh air, eye soothing waves of multiple shades of green over vast stretch of farm land, cows standing proud in front of mud plastered houses, dogs lazily strolling around, hens nervously chasing chicks to hurl them to a safe corner, carefree healthy people busy in daily routine. This is 4-Chak Ramdewali, an old village at 15-minute drive from Faisalabad, that residents fear might disappear over the next five years.

A brief visit to the village where half the population is of Hindus late January was delightful. The village did lack basic physical and social amenities — a proper sewage system, piped water and natural gas supply — that could improve the living conditions. A two-room dysfunctional dilapidated school building tells a tale of neglect and misplaced government priorities.

The change, however, this writer learnt, was in the making but not for the better. “Big patches of land where you see standing crops have already been acquired by a real estate company. Some people are resisting but I don’t think they would be able to hold ground for long. Offers are too attractive to ignore,” Shehzad Saleem, a dejected man standing next to his family’s sugarcane field, told this scribe.

“For generations this has been our home. Like many others I work in Faisalabad and send children to school there but never considered moving out. My family home here has given me a rare opportunity: to enjoy the bliss of nature without compromising on my dream of a regular better paying job. Our hearts sink as we know the builders will destroy farms and 4-Chak Ramdewali will soon disappear,” he lamented.

Asked what can be done to save the prime agriculture land, he said, “These are private farms and purchase offers are many times more than the assessed value of the land. We see no option but to accept the destiny and try to make most out it,” he added.

“Who will bother for the land utilisation policy when realtors are thriving on new schemes, landowners are getting a good price and prospective buyers are gaining opportunity that did not exist earlier” — Dr Asad Zaman

People related to the field and the senior government officers in Islamabad with rural background confirmed to Dawn that the trend is pervasive particularly in Punjab.

“It is sad and self-destructive. We are letting greedy realtors erode the base of the rural economy. The scale of the activity threatens the food security and future of cash crops. The massive housing schemes on fertile land are a folly that will not go unpunished by nature,” a senior economist at the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) warned.

Commenting on a legal recourse to check the activity, experts said they were not aware of any policy framework that defines rules of land utilisation in the country.

Planning Commission Chief Economist Dr Nadeem Javaid accepted the absence of comprehensive legal framework for land use and the ensuing confusion over domain. “We have inducted a chapter in the 11th Five-Year Plan (available on its website) on town planning but this is all we can do. The implementation of economic guidelines rests with different tiers of the government,” he said over phone from Islamabad focusing more on the role of municipalities in cities and lapses therein.

PIDE Vice Chancellor Dr Asad Zaman did not mince words: “The issue is very serious and no one is paying attention to it. The neglect is rooted in the tendency to strive for immediate gain ignoring long-term consequences. The assumption that market can guide and drive towards better solutions has proved to be wrong. Often, short-term profits lead to long-term catastrophes,” Zaman remarked. He mentioned global financial crisis and climate change in support of the argument.

“Who will bother for the land utilisation policy when realtors are thriving on new schemes, landowners are getting good price and prospective buyers are gaining opportunity that did not exist earlier. Town planners feel such development would curtail pressure of rural migration to cities,” he added.

“Pakistan, like an innocent person, unaware of its strengths and weaknesses, is being exploited and abused by greedy interest groups,” commented a senior economist.

The nation has yet to learn to value its assets and through collective campaign and action protect them from short sighted greedy elements by forcing authorities to plug loopholes in the policy framework and lags in its implementation.

There is no land utilisation policy in place and no one has been assigned the responsibility to sort it out so far. Many states may have not been able to apply their policy effectively, but they do have one that demarcates land dedicated for agriculture, for transformation to semi- and urban areas, industrial estates, ecological and hazard-vulnerable areas. They set the land use patterns for each category.

Dr Shakeel Ahmed Khan, former federal wheat commissioner, told Dawn that the Saarc Committee on Food Security did include the issue in its recommendations. “I was Pakistan’s nominee on the committee that drew guidelines for all Saarc countries to put in place land utilisation policy in rural area to protect prime agriculture land from encroachment,” he said.

Published in Dawn, Business & Finance weekly, February 8th, 2016