LAHORE, June 10: The Doctors' Hospital administration and the owner of an adjoining house continue to encroach on the service lane of the canal road along the newly-constructed underpass, hindering construction of the lane.

The hospital administration is utilizing this portion of the service lane as a parking lot while the house owner has raised a structure on it. Construction of the service lane from the Jinnah Hospital underpass to the Canal View is part of the underpass project. However, the work has been suspended due to encroachment.

The construction company says it cannot resume work without being given a go-ahead by the authorities concerned. However, the rest of construction work will be completed in a couple of weeks, it claims.

The Communication & Works Department which had allowed the company to demolish the boundary walls of a couple of plots on the service road, could not take action against the other "powerful" encroachers because of pressure from certain quarters.

Hundreds of trees had been uprooted to provide space for the service road, but no sincere effort was ever made to undo encroachment by influential people. A C&W official supervising the underpasses project told Dawn on Thursday that the department could not take action against the encroachers as they had obtained an NOC from the Lahore Development Authority.

"When the LDA approved this piece of land, the area encroached upon was not shown on the map as service road," he said, adding that the department had now decided to leave the encroachment intact and build a parallel road. He said the department had tried to negotiate sale of the parking lot with the Doctors' Hospital administration but to no avail.

Former Punjab governor Ghulam Mustafa Khar sold the land to hospital's management after getting the service road approved by the chief minister in 1995. A representative of the company alleged that the LDA had sold some plots located on the service road, owners of which held a demonstration against the authority and the company when boundary walls of their plots were demolished.

Answering a question, he said the department had promised to pay for the construction of the whole service road. However, the C&W official was of the view that the department would only pay for the constructed portion.

A representative of the Doctors' Hospital administration said the parking lot was part of the hospital. He said the new LDA map did not show the area as part of the service lane.