LAHORE: Life for those living on and around Khayaban-i-Jinnah – the boulevard connecting Johar Town with the Raiwind Road – has turned, in residents’ parlance, hellish for the last six months as the exits of many housing societies have been closed and traffic of six-lane wide thoroughfare is shoved into one-lane narrow bottleneck.

The Lahore Development Authority (LDA) has been laying drainage pipes on the road since March as part of the master plan, developing drainage under Johar Town and 25 suburban housing societies in the area.

For the residents of Jinnah Road, it effectively means 100 per cent traffic pushed into 16pc of space, creating massive blockages during three spikes – morning school and office times, school closing in the afternoon and office and business’s closure in the evening – and keeping vehicles hostages for hours. This has been going on for the last six months.

“It is a nerve-wrecking experience to drop children at schools in the morning,” laments Kazim Raza – a resident of the Airline Society that falls on the Jinnah Road. The detour is hardly three kilometer long because now we have to take narrow exit on the backside of the society to drop our kids in Wapda Town, but time addition is simply disastrous; ten minutes journey in pre-digging days now lasts for an hour, with children getting irritated before arriving at the school in the morning and parent, or driver, not only going through agonising experience but also getting mentally ready to repeat the performance in the afternoon when he/she returns to pick them up, he says.

The LDA should have been wise enough to at least built pedestrian bridges connecting colonies before shutting their exits down and lessen the pain of the inter-colony commuters, he suggests.

“It is not only routine matters going topsy tuvy, but there may be medical or any other kind of social emergencies in which any delay could have serious consequences,” Muhammad Shabeer of the Architect Society explains.

These societies are now literally marooned, with their main exits dug up for drainage and back lanes dug for Orange Line project, he laments. One can understand concepts of development and urban renewal but the officials also have to understand allied concepts of building alternatives road network before limiting people’s movement to their localities, he adds. Even the prices of vegetables in these societies have tripled because of commuting problems, he says. All front yards of houses are ruined because of the massive traffic flow that they have to take on each minute basis, he says. Was the master drainage development plan conceived in isolation or people living in the area and other stakeholders were taken on board, he wonders.

“All shops and showrooms falling on the main road have been closed for the last six months. Who planned this unplanned development, people need to be informed,” he demands.

The massive machines involved in 60-odd feet digging of roads for laying pipe are really noisy and scary; their rash drivers only make them look threatening for all vehicular traffic plying on the road, complains Abbas Ali.

“The noise pollution in the area is also nerve-testing as these huge machines work 24 hours. One sounds anti-development buff when lodging complaints like this, but it is also necessary to highlight the missing social sensitivity, which makes the entire project questionable. The government has the mandate and the duty to execute development plans, but they should revolve around people their businesses and daily routines, not other way round. Here, the government seems guilty of ignoring human component of the development and going for crude planning and execution. One can only hope that the LDA would be pushed to be more humane when other part of the master plan is executed,” he says.

The LDA’s Water and Sanitation Agency (Wasa) officials claim that all pipes have been laid to complete the drain being constructed on the road and now road repair work is being started.

“The entire project should be complete in a month,” says Wasa chief, adding: “Original completion deadline was May 3, 2017. The chief minister squeezed it to Nov 15, this year – a time reduction of over six months precisely because of mitigating problems being faced by people in the area.”

Published in Dawn, October 22nd, 2016