KARACHI, June 11: Talking about the many problems that have come up after previous evictions of people from poor settlements in the city as a result of development work there, architect, planner and teacher Arif Hasan said that another 5,000 houses were expected to be bulldozed as a result of the planned circular railway.

Mr Hasan was giving the inaugural talk in the Perween Rahman Lecture Series at T2F here on Tuesday.

“Over 30,000 homes were demolished for the Lyari Expressway,” he said, adding that their owners were presented with Rs50,000 each along with an 80-yard plot on the outskirts of the city that only added to their problems instead of solving them.

“Ninety-eight per cent of the people displaced at the time became poorer due to added transport expenses because of the extra distance they had to travel to reach the city. Their women lost their jobs, their children couldn’t go to schools, several students missed their matriculation exams, too, as an immediate effect of the eviction,” he explained.

“Asked why they couldn’t be rehabilitated on vacant government land nearby, the bureaucrats making these decisions said that the land would have been too expensive for them. When explained that they could still pay for it in installments in 15 years, they had another excuse for not giving it to them citing that they might sell it off later on. Also it was said that if they were resettled there, they would hurt the look and price of the surrounding areas making them look like low-income areas, too,” Mr Hasan regretted.

“After research it has also been found that there are so many projects where the houses are not even needed to be bulldozed as we had found after reworking one area that actually needed only eight houses to be shifted but what happened there was an absolute shame. This goes on as developers build plazas or political parties indulge in turf wars,” he said.

“It is such kind of decisions that have completely changed the housing situation of Karachi. Because of the high transport costs, the people don’t want to live on the outskirts. So they move back to the city in katchi abadis. The katchi abadis have their own issues, insecurity being one of them,” he pointed out. “Then the density in these areas is also increasing. Like some 10 to 15 people are living in a single room to share the costs. Right now one person is occupying a built area of two-and-a-half metres. The toilets and kitchens they share is another huge issue. People are changing their homes four times in a year now,” he added.

The town planner said that this had been going on since Partition when Karachi had to accommodate some 600,000 people overnight. There were various plans chalked out to settle them, which were scrapped one by one. Later, General Ayub decided on his own to take these settlements of people away from the main city to Korangi and New Karachi. “That also was the beginning of the ethnic divide here,” he said while explaining that the government’s promises to these people also couldn’t be fulfilled as it had said it would provide them with 40,000 houses in two years but could only give them 10,000 during that much time. So the katchi abadis was the only solution left for these people. But one by one the katchi abadis, too, were being bulldozed, he said.

“It was like this until the Malkana Huqooq [ownership rights] Programme, of regulating the katchi abadi settlements, was introduced by the first Peoples Party government. Then came the Gen Zia era when it was stopped or slowed down. But the katchi abadi population continued increasing, producing inner city slums. Although there is regularisation, the rate of improvement of settlements is slow,” he explained.

“Goths aren’t even regularised and some 2,000 women from goths move to Clifton or Defence every day to work as domestic help in houses there. They leave home at around 6.30am and return at 7pm. They spend Rs120 on transport every day. Goths near all the big societies are fast disappearing. Perween Rahman documented some 1,800 goths,” he said.

“Today I say the people who would be displaced to make way for the Karachi Circular Railway should be settled where they work, where their children go to school and near their relatives. But once again they are being offered Rs50,000 and 80 yards of land somewhere far away. There is 13,000 acres of land for the new Defence City. It has 2,000 villages, 26 goths, graveyards, etc. The people living there for years should stay there. Road access, too, should be provided to them.”

“The face of migration has changed. Earlier, when migration took place, it was out of peoples’ own choice where the institutions were working, and they only moved to better their lives. Today, migration is being forced on people,” he observed.

“I remember Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan’s words that he could see volcanoes all over Karachi in form of the low-income areas. He though they would eventually erupt if something would not be done about them. That is where the Orangi Pilot Project came in, to transform these settlements. But the OPP works in Orangi only. There are still so many other settlements where the same work is needed while the standards of living are depleting,” he said.

Earlier, poet Azra Abbas, architect Mr Sirajuddin of Technical Training and Resource Centre, Perween Rahman’s student Mir Raza Ali and her elder sister, researcher and writer Aquila Ismail shared their fond memories of the urban planner, architect and social worker who was brutally murdered on March 13 on her way home from work.