By IPS Correspondents
ISLAMABAD, Apr 9 2001 (IPS)

After living for 15 years in a city slum, Razia Khatoon was forced to leave her home and given land to build a new house on the outskirts of the Pakistani capital.

Like hundreds of other shanty town dwellers, Khatoon, who works as a domestic help, was evicted in keeping with a new government policy to beautify Islamabad.

This involves removing the 16 squatter settlements that are home to an estimated 20 percent of the nearly one million people in the capital city.

Khatoon has been offered a tiny plot of land to build a small, two-room house. The land will cost her 52,000 rupees (about 800 U.S. dollars), which can be paid in easy monthly installments.

According to Pakistan’s Labour Minister Omar Asghar Khan, this is part of a national slum rehabilitation programme, which will involve relocating shanty town dwellers in all big cities of the country.

The minister blames “inefficient supply” of housing for low- income people, for the rapid proliferation of slums in Pakistan’s big cities.

He also sees an “inherent elite bias” in national housing development with more and more colonies for the rich coming up in the big cities.

Pakistan’s latest official economic survey estimates a shortfall of 4.3 million houses in the country.

Because of population growth, Pakistan must build an extra 0.9 million houses every year to meet the demand. However, private and public sector developers construct only 0.3 million houses a year.

The shortfall is being met by mushrooming slum colonies. Officials statistics show that nearly a third of Pakistan’s urban population lives in squatter settlements.

The problem is expected to worsen in the coming years, with official projections showing that Pakistan will have at least 25 more cities with four million people each, by the year 2025.

At present there are 23 cities with a population of more than 0.2 million people. An estimated 32.5 percent of Pakistan’s 137.5 million people live in urban areas.

Pressure is being added by the growing rural to urban migration. The country’s villages were home to 67.5 percent of the population in the year 1998, compared to 71.7 percent in the early 1980s.

According to a study by the University of Karachi, in the southern port metropolis of that name, 50 percent of the city’s 10 million people live in 539 slum colonies.

Pakistan’s second largest city of Lahore, the capital of central Punjab province, has 236 squatter colonies. Even these are not enough and some 50,000 people sleep under open skies in Lahore.

All slums are located on government land, usually illegally occupied by powerful land dealers, who in turn subdivide and sell it to low- income people to build houses.

Slums are difficult to remove because their large population makes them attractive ‘vote banks’ for local politicians who usually manage to use their connections to get the slum ‘regularised’.

This means recognition by civic authorities and makes it easy to provide basic amenities — piped water and electricity — to the slum dwellers.

In the year 1985, the then Pakistani government regularised all existing shanty towns. The tenants were offered a 99-year lease on their homes if they paid for the land and provision of amenities.

Urban planners blame this policy for having encouraged the rapid growth of slums in Pakistani cities.

Critics say that the government is now making a similar mistake. Asim Akhtar, an activist of the All Pakistan Alliance of ‘Katchi Abadis’ (slum colonies) thinks that the new slum relocation policy is flawed.

“Instead of admitting its failure in providing shelter to the poor, the government has declared slum dwellers as illegal encroachers and branded them criminals,” he says.

Several slums are located on the sides of railway lines and railway authorities are leading the eviction drive. Some 500 squatter residences have been uprooted from railway land in Karachi and another 100 have been removed from the northwestern city of Peshawar.

Some think that the government should resume the old policy of regularising the slums. They cite the example of the Sindh Kachi Abadi Development Authority in the southern province.

Over the last 14 years, the Sindh slum development authority has regularised 626 squatter colonies in the province, earning 550 million rupees (10 million dollars) from the dwellers.

Urban development experts say that a better way is to tackle the cause of the problem by developing more medium size cities to act as alternative magnets for the rural influx.

They also want the government to build more, low-income housing colonies. Instead, the government this year, launched a scheme to build 4,500 houses, each priced between one to two million rupees.

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