PESHAWAR: For the newly-posted Peshawar Development Authority Director General, Ammara Khan, her work has already been cut out for her — completion of the seemingly never-ending saga of Bus Rapid Transit, beautification of one of the oldest living cities in Asia and urban foresting — to name just a few.

To make the challenges more daunting for the first female officer to head a development body in KP, add the long-anticipated Peshawar Model Town project, the biggest township to boot in the entire Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

But she is no novice to the game and brings ample experience to the job. Before her posting to KP, Ms Khan headed the Rawalpindi Development Authority for a little more than a year and supervised large ADP schemes including the Rawalpindi Ring Road and Leh expressway, approval of private housing schemes, urban regeneration and commercialisation.

Between December 2013 and May 2016, she served as the Additional DG (Housing) of Lahore Development Authority.

In between and prior to this she served on many administrative posts including the one that saw her as the deputy commissioner, Kasur, in the Punjab.

Few people would know but before joining the civil service, Ammara had served on the editorial desk of an English newspaper in Lahore, writing editorials.

A master degree-holder in English Literature and a law graduate, Ammara Khan comes from the 34th Common. She is an officer of the Pakistan Administrative Service — a DMG officer in common parlance.

She, thus, has become only the second DMG officer to head PDA, after the late Javed Alam Khanzada, who had served in the development body in 1988.

Ms Khan has never served in KP, having worked in the Punjab after joining the civil service, but she says she is no stranger to Peshawar. Her husband, also a civil officer, is a Pashtun and her in-laws are all Peshawar-based. “So, Peshawar is not a strange place to me”, she says.

And as for the challenges ahead, she knows it is not going to be easy to head an organisation of nearly 3,500 men with just a few women working mostly as telephone operators and stenographers.

“There are challenges in every organisation. There are people who suffer from inertia and there are those who resist change. There are good officers and there are bad officers. A good administrator is one who assembles a team of good officers. It is my job to make a difference and I will”, a determined Ammara said.

Published in Dawn, February 27th, 2021