KARACHI, Sept 4 The Pakistan Rangers are carrying out illegal construction at their temporary headquarters, the Jinnah Courts, which is protected under the Sindh Cultural Heritage Protection Act, it emerged on Saturday.
The Rangers say that they are just doing routine maintenance work and laying a sewerage system while the provincial culture department maintains that no such permission had been given to the Rangers to carry out any work at the protected site.
According to highly placed sources, nobody including the owner, occupier, etc, can carry out any kind of construction work including repairs, restoration, rehabilitation, etc, in a site that protected under the Act, which prescribes long prison terms and heavy fines on the violators.
If anybody wanted to carry out any construction work in a protected site, a permission/NOC is to be obtained from the advisory committee on cultural affairs, which is headed by the Sindh chief secretary.
The sources said that an application, along with the proposals of the work to be done, is to be submitted to the culture department which would put it in the advisory committee meeting that would subsequently send it to its technical subcommittee where it would be minutely examined and its recommendations are forwarded to the advisory committee which then takes a decision.
The culture department then passes that decision to the person who had moved the request.
The department has no powers to make decisions and such powers fully rest with the advisory committee and the department only acts as a post office i.e. collecting applications and when the decision was taken by the advisory committee return them to applicants.
The new construction in Jinnah Courts is being carried out on both sides of a smaller building, which was also constructed illegally without the permission from the advisory committee, behind the main building. It would be on the right hand side after the bigger building, a troops' hostel, when one enters the Jinnah Courts premises.
The pillars are coming out of the ground and cement concrete plinth had also being laid and exposed iron bars of the pillars were about five to six feet above the ground suggesting that walls would also be erected. The construction pattern suggested that the Rangers were constructing some rooms.
Responding to Dawn queries, a Rangers spokesperson, Major Aurangzeb, said that only routine maintenance work was being carried out and a sewerage system, which had worn out, was being laid so that rainwater which usually accumulated there could be effectively drained.
To a question about possible construction of rooms in the light of the construction pattern, he said that he did not know about it and would check again and respond.
However, despite repeated attempts, the spokesperson did not pick his cellphone.
To another question if the Rangers had the NOC/permission from the advisory committee to carry out the construction in the protected site, he said that this was very minor and routine work.
Responding to Dawn queries, Sindh Culture Secretary Ahmad Bux Narejo said that the Rangers had not applied for any permission or a NOC to carry out any construction work in the Jinnah Courts.
He, however, said that he had written a letter to the Rangers on the issue informing them that a departmental team would visit the site to carry out inspection. He said that once his officials reported him after visiting the site he would be in a better position to respond properly.
The sources said that this was not the first time that the Rangers were carrying out illegal construction in their headquarters since they moved in to the Jinnah Courts on a temporary basis after they were asked to vacate the Shaikh Zayed Islamic Centre Building in Karachi University.
The Sindh government had allowed the Rangers to shift into the Jinnah Courts, originally a hostel, and also allotted land to the Rangers to construct their headquarters on it, but the Rangers rather than constructing their headquarters on the land were using it for some other purposes and at the same time had constructed at least two buildings — costing millions of rupees — in the Jinnah Courts premises.
The sources said that the culture department rarely took any action against influential organisations, including the Rangers, when they violated the Act by constructing in or demolishing the protected site. However, it quickly acted against common citizens when they violated the Act.
They said that the government loses moral authority when it punishes the weaker sections of the society while looks the other way when similar illegality was committed by the influential organisations, people.