Re: Bridge Collapses
This was pretty much expected... People like Cowasjee have been warning against this for ahes now.
These Karachi developers have absolutely no scruples...
Laore is fortunate that the courts ordered a halt to construction of all large buildings.. Karachi unfortunately, is incapable of getting anything done with the coruption thats so rampant there...
Its a pity that supreme court has to interfere in every matter to give some relief to people. Its just 4 days ago that Cowasjee wrote this
[QUOTE]
THE Supreme Court of Pakistan, headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, has been of immense help to Lahore. Of late, an appellate bench of the Supreme Court comprising Justice Khalil-ur-Rehman Ramday and Justice Falak Sher has created history in that fair city.
It started on April 5, 2006, when angry Lahore citizen Farooq Hameed filed an appeal (under Article 185(3) of the Constitution) against an order dated February 17, 2006, handed down by the Lahore High Court. The court had refused to stop the illegal construction of a monstrous high-rise building, ‘Boulevard Heights’ (18 floors plus basement) on the Main Gulberg Boulevard adjacent to his bungalow. He was ably represented by advocate Syed Mansoor Ali Shah, a battling and tenacious environmentalist.
A year and a few hearings later, on May 11, 2007, the exasperated bench ordered, inter alia:
**“While hearing this matter in the month of July last year, we were horrified to notice that the Lahore Development Authority and other governmental agencies had allowed construction of high-rise buildings in the city of Lahore without following the laws regulating the subject, as a result whereof these multi-storeyed buildings had become a grave threat to the lives and the properties not only of the people living, occupying or using the said buildings but also of a multitude of others, i.e., the neighbours, the visitors and even the ones passing by. The height of callousness and disregard for human lives and properties shown by them was evident, inter alia, from the fact that not even a single structure engineer was available with the LDA (Lahore Development Authority) who could have checked, supervised or ensured the structural stability of these structures. Nor had any steps even been taken by the LDA to check the bearing capacity of the soil where these buildings were raised. We had consequently passed an order on 19.7.2006 carrying some directions to be followed in the matter...
“The situation is appalling. The need for the strictest of controls on the construction of high-rise buildings hardly requires any emphasis. Suchlike buildings if not constructed under the requisite checks and in conformity with the laws and regulations governing the subject, could become death traps for hundreds of innocent and even unconcerned persons besides immeasurable loss to the properties. Examples of suchlike disasters in different cities including the city of Lahore are not unknown…”It was also found that environmental impact assessments, as required by the Environmental Protection Act 1997, were not being conducted.
**The judges intervened forcefully to protect the lives and properties of the public and stayed construction of all high-rise buildings in Lahore of over three storeys. As observed Justice Ramday, “extraordinary steps are required to meet extraordinary situations.”
Additionally, the judges wisely made all other interim orders passed by subordinate courts (to whom the errant builders had rushed when the LDA took minor actions) subject to the order of the Supreme Court, and directed that the area police SHO ensure compliance with the stay order.
Two weeks later, the zila nazim of Lahore (and chairman of the LDA) submitted a list of 1,064 illegal under-construction buildings in the city. Over the past three months these buildings are being individually examined by the appointed commission and progress reports are submitted to the court.
The commission is also examining the available utilities and infrastructure, as the court was concerned that the inordinate increase in the number of users of each bungalow-turned-high-rise plot was likely to cause immense problems, such as inadequate road capacity and parking spaces for resulting traffic, non-availability of adequate water supply, overloading of the sewerage and drainage, and so on and so forth — adverse effects of which we in Pakistan’s cities are all too well aware.
Since then, demolition action on a number of unlawfully constructed buildings has commenced. The press has kept us abreast of some of the details, including, interestingly, an entreaty to Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz on behalf of a hospital by a group of Pakistani doctors from the US.
The back page of the August 22 issue of Dawn carried a large multi-coloured appeal inserted by the Lahore Builders & Developers Association addressed to the president, the prime minister, the federal law minister, the governor of Punjab and the chief minister of Punjab begging them to rush to the rescue of 1,400 buildings in Lahore threatened with demolition.
The members (recalcitrants?) played the familiar “poor orphans and widows” card though none were involved, the devastating effect on the provincial and national economy (and presumably their own pockets), the resulting massive unemployment, widespread homelessness, multiple bankruptcies, the ruination of the cheated small investors, the shying away of foreign investors, and so on and so forth — all nonsense. They asked that the illegal buildings be “regularised” as was so wickedly and corruptly done in Karachi.
*The story of the “regularisation” of Karachi’s illegal buildings is shameful. In the case of any illegal building which the Sindh High Court had ordered to be demolished, the Karachi-based Association of Builders & Developers (ABAD) narrated heartbreaking stories of “widows and orphans who had invested their life-savings”.
*
ABAD succeeded in duping the then governor of Sindh, Mohammadmian Soomro, and then Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz into passing the 2002 amnesty on all illegal and dangerous buildings. In return, ABAD promised a collection of Rs10 billion in penalties. Some 10 per cent of that amount has been collected to date.
Most ABAD members have not had their illegalities “regularised”, a few high-rise structures that were being challenged by citizens’ groups and were under threat of demolition paid the first 25 per cent instalment (they have not paid the rest) after having the penalty rates reduced, and illegal structures were “regularised” on the basis of bogus seismic stability certificates issued by the same “briefcase engineers” who were responsible for the widespread illegal construction in the first place.
When hundreds of “regularised” buildings collapse in the event Karachi is hit by an earthquake, the Karachi Building Control Authority will accept no responsibility and will simply shift all blame over to the builders’ engineers. Corrupt KBCA officials, who had made money while originally allowing the illegal construction, made much more money while allowing the same projects to be “regularised”.
The people’s NGO Shehri, which has been valiantly battling the Karachi builders’ mafia over the past 15 years (one step forward, two backwards), were so greatly heartened by the activism shown by the Supreme Court in the case of Lahore and its environmental degradation that its members, on August 10, 2007, sent off an appeal to Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry which, inter alia, reads:
“The citizens of Karachi are extremely appreciative of the strict lawful actions being taken by the Hon’ble Supreme Court to tackle the appalling menace of illegal construction in the city of Lahore. The awareness shown of the extent and critical nature of the hazard to the public interest, the environment and the lives of the ordinary citizens is outstanding. The situation in Karachi, which has more than twice the population of Lahore, is at least 10 times as bad. Attached as Annexure-1 is a truly amazing Public Notice/Warning published in the press of September 1, 1998, by the KBCA stating that for 26 high-rise buildings on Sharah-i-Faisal “…the unauthorised construction is potentially dangerous as they are being built without an approved plan, have not been properly supervised by a KBCA licensed architect/engineer. They are being constructed in violation of earthquake resistance design.”
“Nine years later, despite our best efforts, nothing has been done about these ‘potentially dangerous’ structures.
“This is but the tip of the iceberg. All the violations determined by the Hon’ble Supreme Court in the thousands of buildings in Lahore are present to a higher degree in the tens of thousands of building in Karachi — and the problem increases by the day.
“In the public interest, to safeguard the lives and properties of millions of innocent citizens, and to safeguard the constantly deteriorating built environment of Karachi, we appeal to you to take suo motu notice of this widespread corruption and contempt for the law. Please summon the officials of the provincial and city governments, including the building control authorities of city and cantonment jurisdictions, and ask them why the applicable rules and regulations are not being enforced.”
All law abiding decent citizens of this country are crying out for an end to the deplorable governance, or rather non-governance. Do they realise that nothing can be achieved without the implementation of law and order, the imposition of which said Founder-Maker Mohammad Ali Jinnah is the first duty of any government?The Supreme Court of Pakistan has taken judicial notice of numerous issues adversely affecting the human rights of the citizens and the country’s environment (including traffic congestion) for which the people are truly grateful. There could be, and we are hoping that indeed there is, a glimpse of light at the end of that dark seemingly unending tunnel.
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