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KARACHI, Nov 9: The much-trumpeted Amnesty Ordinance 2004, which allowed the regularisation of illegally constructed structures, has failed to benefit the owners and occupants of an estimated 10,000 apartment buildings in the city since their builders did not apply for regularisation in the nearly two-year long period granted.
Well-placed sources in the Karachi Building Control Authority (KBCA) told Dawn that the period for applying for regularisation expired in September last year, before which a mere two per cent of the builders and owners of illegally constructed apartment buildings or bungalows benefited under the ordinance.
Worst-affected by the builders’ inaction are the individual flat owners, most of them from low- and middle-income groups. Without their buildings’ regularisation, they cannot have their flats sub-leased in their favour or transferred since completion certificates cannot be issued.
Such allotees have already paid heavy amounts in order to get possession of their apartments. Meanwhile, the builders of a large number of apartment complexes – having first constructed the buildings illegally – did not apply for regularisation and yet went unpunished. The irony is that under a clause of the Amnesty Ordinance, such builders were to be treated as absconders. Sources say, however, that the KBCA neither declared any builders absconders, nor withheld the no-objection certificates (NOCs) for new projects announced by the same builders during the amnesty period.
The KBCA chief controller, Rauf Akhtar Farooqui, confirmed that there are between 8,000 and 10,000 un-regularised buildings in the city that were either illegally constructed or built on disputed land sold by earlier governments to influential builders at throwaway prices. Pointing out that these buildings cannot now be regularised since the amnesty period has lapsed, he said that a total of 15,000 cases were received by the KBCA during the period stipulated by the ordinance. Of these, 5,000 cases have been cleared generating Rs1 billion in penalties. In the remaining cases, the builders/owners did not pursue their applications despite having challans detailing the penalty amount.
“In most cases, the builders and owners who had applied for the regularisation of their illegally-constructed buildings got the challans for the penalty amount prepared from the KBCA but did not deposit them” he told Dawn. “Moreover, these penalties were hardly 25 per cent of the sum usually levied on illegally-constructed buildings. The only ones who took advantage of the ordinance were either those builders who had on-going cases in court, or who were seeking loans from various financial institutions.”
