The hearing was organised by the Punjab environment department amid the objection that a provincial body could not be a fair judge against another provincial organisation (communication and works department) executing the project.
Several flaws and distortion of facts were pointed out in the EIA by representatives of civil society.
As the venue selected for the hearing was not spacious, students from some educational institutions were barred from attending the proceedings. On protest by some, they were allowed to join in for sitting on the ground or remain standing at whatever open space was available.
“We were expecting not more than a dozen people,” admitted Traffic Engineering and Transport Planning Agency managing director Naveed Mushtaq after the event was over. “Next time some marriage hall will be hired to accommodate a maximum of participants.”
The proceedings started with a briefing of the EIA by Nespak, which has submitted the report, while an executive summary of it was also offered to the participants on demand.
Former traffic police DIG Syed Salman Khaliq lamented that Tepa’s inefficiency could be gauged from zigzagging of underpasses. He questioned that how many saplings had been planted to make up for the environmental loss caused by cutting 2,500 trees in the name of road widening earlier.
Comparing traffic problems of Lahore with that of London, he said better planning and management by the police in the latter place was making all the difference.
Raising the EPD’s jurisdiction issue, lawyer Mansoor Ali Shah said making accused a judge (the provincial government) was against the principle of transparency and good governance. He also found the project’s scope unclear.
“There is no mention that where the 300,000 vehicles expected to use this expressway would go from here. No study has been conducted on this aspect of the project.”
Neither the committee of experts nor the advisory committee that could approve or reject the project had been constituted as required under the law, he said, lamenting that the level of qualifications of the Nespak team that conducted the EIA was also missing from the report.
Rejecting the quality of collection of data, he said the scope of alternatives was limited to other routes’ options while improvement of public transport and alternatives were totally ignored.
Mr Shah also objected that being designer of the canal road-widening project, Nespak stood disqualified to author its EIA report.
Civil society activist Feryal Ali Gauhar said the report lacked future projections. The public health cost to be incurred while saving fuel, as the project promised, also got no mention in it, she said. The report stated 38 per cent increase in vehicular traffic volume but offered planning for tackling only four per cent of it, regretted she.
WWF’s Hammad Naqi denied the claim in the EIA that they ever said that widening of the road was necessary for managing traffic.
He pointed out that ecological resources of the area were also very poorly documented in the report, deploring that the consultants used the inventory provided by the TEPA, the proponent of the project.
“The consultants didn’t even bother to establish the inventory of their own of a very sensitive aspect, putting a question mark on the credibility of this report.” They also mentioned only four species of birds and, in fact, three of them were strangers to Lahore as they lived in mountainous areas of Kallar Kahar and Murree, which means no professional ecologist has been consulted for preparing the report, he said.
He said a WWF study had found 46 species of birds that had made the greenery along the canal as their habitat. Naqi also contested integrity of the statistics about number and species of trees in the area under consideration. There are a total of 5,967 trees on both left and right bank greenbelts, he said giving the break-up of the species and their relative abundance.
The level of public consultation was also alleged to be poor. The results given in the report does not reflect the true picture as the respondents, total 150 in number, were not educated about the likely outcome of their views against the standards and norms for such studies, he commented.
He wondered that against world standards Nespak had taken traffic intensity ratio for two hours.
Refuting the claim made in the EIA, he said the widened road would rather result in increased ratio of accidents.
Dr Jameel, a former WHO official, was distressed to know that no health study had been conducted to assess feasibility of the project as was done for building water reservoirs and other projects.