ISLAMABAD, June 10: The government has tried to brush under the carpet the vital issue of backlog of six to seven million housing units in the country in the Economic Survey 2006-07.

The survey has steered away from many grey areas and is silent on the growing number of vehicles, a constant source of air pollution.

Chapter 16 of the Economic Survey, which usually deals with environment and housing, simply commends pro-environment efforts of the government this year without even touching on the problem of housing and the government’s policy towards checking the growth of slums and squatter settlements.

The last year’s survey had put the housing backlog at 6.19 million. It had proposed an annual increase of half a million housing units to meet the residential requirement in next two decades.

The present housing stock is rapidly ageing and estimates suggest that more than half of the stock is over 50 years old. It estimated that half of the country’s urban population lived in slums and squatter settlements.

One cannot find any details of the House Building Finance Corporation (HBFC) which was supposed to enhance loans from the 2005-06 level of Rs1.2billion to Rs7billion in the next five years.

In the last survey, the government had promised subsidised micro-loaning facilities to be extended by Khushhali Bank, Zakat Fund and other micro-financing systems and institutions to the rural housing. In the current survey, there are no details of the number of housing units financed by such institutions in villages of the country.

There are no details of what happened to the government’s last year’s plan to replace slums with commercial areas under the National Housing Policy. The Indian government has already taken a lead in this sector as it has started converting the biggest slum areas in Mumbai and other cities in low cost housing/apartments to be owned by the same slum dwellers, a move that would certainly dent the poverty. The Pakistani government policy to convert slums into commercial zones seems too much commercial with no or little intentions of poverty reduction.

The current survey has touched upon the issue of vehicular pollution and the growing trend of conversion of vehicles to CNG which stood at 1.4 million as on May 16, 2007. There is also the number of the 1,450 CNG stations in the country.

However, the survey has no record of the existing number of vehicles and the growing trend of private vehicle ownership in the country – a constant source of air pollution. Perhaps, the government does not like to give a clear picture of its efforts to achieve environment related targets of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the survey.

The survey had stated that the number of vehicles in the country had jumped to 4 million in 20 years from 0.8 million, which was an increase of 400 per cent. The average compound growth of vehicles was about 11 per cent per annum.

Since 1980, according to the last year’s survey, the maximum growth has been seen in two-stroke vehicles such as delivery vans, which are about 1,751 per cent, followed by motorcycles 541 per cent and rickshaws 159 per cent.