LAHORE, Dec 3: The Punjab Housing and Town Planning Agency has declared 31,478 acre land between Lahore Ring Road, Mominpura, River Ravi and BRB Canal controlled area for the proposed lake city and sports city projects and imposed a ban on all kinds of construction and sub-division of land without its approval.

A decision to this effect was taken at a meeting held here on Sunday with Punjab Housing and Urban Development Minister Syed Raza Ali Gilani in the chair and attended, among others, by housing director-general Engineer Shahzad Jamil, Local Government additional secretary Izhar Ahmad, Colonies (BoR) deputy secretary and Finance deputy secretary Mohammad Mahmood H Jaffery.

Speaking on the occasion, the minister said 3,000 acre area would be utilised for the development of sports city and the remaining 28,000 for the lake city project.

He said the five rivers in sports city would symbolize the rivers of Punjab.

The minister directed the agency director-general to formulate a plan for declaring 10-kilometre area around the big cities controlled to check the mushroom growth of colonies.

Mr Gilani also stressed the need for planning for the development of new towns in the province with modern civic amenities to control a large-scale migration of people to big cities.

He ordered transfer of all the existing housing schemes to the town/tehsil municipal administrations concerned for maintenance so that the agency could concentrate on planning and development of new schemes.

He also constituted a three-member committee, headed by the director-general, to formulate service rules for the PHATA employees.