PESHAWAR, Oct 7: Despite repeated official assurances, little progress has been made to establish the proposed industrial estate at Darra Adamkhel to legalise the tribal town’s arms manufacturing business.

The delay has hampered the government’s endeavour to check illegal business practices and smuggling of illicit arms from Darra Adamkhel to the settled parts of Pakistan, according to information gathered through background interviews with knowledgeable sources.

However, the plan has once again attracted the government’s attention, giving hope to the tribal businessmen who see it a vital business opportunity.

“We can produce light arms and ammunition, but can’t sell anything directly to the buyers,” said Nasir Khan, the president of Darra Adamkhel Arms Manufacturing Association. He said that the officials concerned told the association that the Fata Development Authority (FDA) had released the funds required for Darra Adamkhel industrial estate project.

A marketing department official of the Pakistan Hunting and Sporting Arms Development Company, a federal government entity, told Dawn that the FDA had recently approved over Rs196 million for the industrial estate.

Mr Khan said that the industrial estate had been under discussion for the last three years and hoped the government’s renewed interest would finally result in the project takeoff.

The plan to establish the industrial estate was conceived by Pervez Musharraf-led government.

It was planned to use the town’s arm manufacturing potential to the benefit of a huge workforce at 16 large arms manufacturing factories and hundreds of workshops and small businesses dealing in illicit arms and ammunition.

The government wanted the tribal arms manufacturers to focus on producing hunting and sporting arms that were high in demand internationally.

The industrial estate, said the PHSADC official, would house incubation centres to help the tribesmen take advantage of modern facilities.

Similarly, a digitized mechanism would be installed at the main entry points of the industrial estate to regulate the business activities through regular inspections.

“The total input and output would be monitored by subjecting every consignment at the industrial estate’s gates,” said the official.

A common facility centre, he added, would also be set up to enable the manufacturers to build critical parts of their products to meet international quality standards.

The official said that the PHSADC, set up in 2006, worked closely with a select group of arms manufacturers from Darra Adamkhel and Peshawar to help them improve their production processes and quality standards. A small consignment of hunting and sporting guns manufactured at Peshawar would shortly be dispatched to the US, said the official.

Similarly, Mr Khan’s company is in the process of exporting 325 pump action shotguns and 155 double barrel shotguns to Lebanon.

The PHSADC official said that the poor law and order situation left his agency with little access to Darra Adamkhel, not allowing it to implement a series of activities it wanted to carry out to improve the production processes and quality standards.