KARACHI: The issues of property matters and housing and the prevention and remedies to improper planning seen in private and cooperative housing societies in Karachi were looked at in length at a seminar organised by the Sindh Building Control Authority (SBCA) in collaboration with the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) here on Monday.

“There are five areas in my view where we have seen issues,” said SBCA director general Iftikhar Qaimkhani.

“The first issue is that the land acquired from the government for a housing scheme does not reach the targeted group. The purpose may have been providing land to the homeless but it ended up with people already living comfortably in their homes in the city. And since they didn’t need a home badly, there was no pressure to develop it,” he explained.

“Revisions on the initial planning, layouts and master plans are a violation. Violations and corruption are related to each other,” he said.

“Then many societies and private schemes here are allotted to people with the knowledge that infrastructure development there will take more than 20 to 25 years so that the allottees sell them off at cheap prices,” he said.

“We at SCBA see so many violations and corruption all around. These include violations of building by-laws,” he said.

‘Violations (of building laws) and corruption are related to each other’

Chairman of Gulzar-i-Hijri Bilal M. Akhtar said there were so many issues in developing private and cooperative societies because there is no mechanism of monitoring and also because NAB “leaves its work incomplete”.

“NAB does a clean-up operation and the menace starts almost as soon as they leave due to a lack of implementation of rules and laws,” he said.

Naveed Izhar of the Karachi Development Authority (KDA) pointed towards the menace of dual allotments, title changes, etc.

Nadeem Rasheed Khan, director of the SBCA’s complaint section, said that good management helped people settle down in various housing societies and cooperative schemes but there were also other societies which did nothing for the development of the land given to them for the people. “SBCA receives many complaints but we can’t control all,” he said.

Tariq Qureshi, deputy director of the Anti-Corruption Establishment, said that sometimes housing schemes were also announced without having land in hand. “To stop such problems, including the problem of double allotments and title change, NAB, ACE, KDA, KMC, the department of land revenue, etc, should all be on the same page to save the public from getting fooled.”

Land distribution

Dean of NED’s department of architecture and planning Dr Noman Ahmed said that ‘land’ was the main issue and its distribution, development and governance were the basic issues. “Do you see land as an asset or a saleable commodity?” he asked. “In urban planning we see land as an asset for society, so we want it to fetch the best market value. But Karachi has a growing population and half of it lives below the poverty line. The distribution of land is not done well. The poor cannot buy land so they settle in katchi abadis. Only those who are rich have access to land,” he said.

Hasan Bakhsh, chairman of the Association of Builders and Developers (Abad), asked NAB to take the responsibility of getting rid of all the ills within private and cooperative housing schemes. “I request the DG NAB to take the initiative. He should form a committee to look into matters including obliging people, and he should give the committee a timeline for the tasks,” he said. “And pray tell me why and how whoever comes in as a secretary of a cooperative society seems to stay there for life?”

Senior NAB official Haroon Rashid said there was no practice of surveying land here. “And so everyone is playing a game,” he said.

“If you don’t like land, you want to exchange it or transfer it. Meanwhile, the secretaries of cooperative societies are clueless of things such as Form-1 and Form-2. There are also many sale deeds for the same piece of land,” he said.

“This city of Karachi is what runs the entire country but if you ask me, things are so bad here that we waste good land due to ill will and stupidity. Even my little village is better than Karachi, where there is no water, no sewerage system, no planning. Even the roads at places are so narrow that I can’t turn my car on them. I have even experienced this in the DHA,” he said.

“And if we talk of societies, well, we are still running them on the laws made in the 1800s. A plumber or gardener here buys land from someone sitting under a tree! This is because there is no authority here that covers all areas and for which everyone is treated equally. Separate housing schemes, different cantonments are no good. The way is to bring all under one authority,” he said.

Published in Dawn, December 11th, 2018