A NEWS report on notices received by citizens living in Karachi’s Defence Housing Authority over the installation of solar panels on their rooftops has once again brought into focus the sometimes fraught relationship between the area’s residents and its administration. According to the report, the DHA has notified and imposed financial penalties on some residents after it deemed their installation of solar panels a “violation” of its building control regulations. The notices have apparently been served mainly on houses where steel structures were installed to elevate solar panels. The move has invited the ire of those affected, who seem not to have been aware that they may have been committing a violation when they were doing the installation. Some have bitterly complained that the authority’s recent ‘awakening’ to the installation of solar panels is just to force residents to cough up hundreds of thousands of rupees more in fees and charges.

The DHA’s response is that the ‘proper process’ for solar installation ensures safety and uniformity in construction. “We can’t let everyone do as they please [...] There needs to be some sort of symmetry, too,” a spokesperson for the authority told this paper. That may be valid, but the DHA should perhaps consider its own failures in providing residents the high standards of living it aspires to — the recent flooding of residential areas being a case in point — before demonstrating so much rigidity. Penalising people, in some cases years after installation has been done, is unreasonable and will cause distress. Instead of making things difficult for residents, perhaps the authority should consider issuing a set of guidelines for solar installation and impose penalties only in cases where there has been a violation or where a demonstrable safety hazard may have been created. The authority must not use its considerable powers to strong-arm citizens, as it has in the past. Otherwise law-abiding citizens should not be subject to the whims of an administration whose own actions have not been beyond reproach.

Published in Dawn, September 19th, 2022