RIGHTS-PAKISTAN: Thousands Face Eviction for Controversial Highway

By Zofeen Ebrahim Reprint | | Print |

Zofeen Ebrahim

KARACHI, Pakistan, Nov 11 2003 (IPS) - A multi-million dollar highway project for this southern port city in Pakistan continues to be rammed through the communities affected, despite grave concerns being raised by Pakistani and international non-government organisations (NGOs) about the fate of those displaced by the construction.

The Lyari Expressway project, conceived in 1989 to relieve transport congestion in the inner-city wards of Karachi, is a 16.5 kilometre high-speed roadway that will be used extensively by heavy vehicles.

Noman Ahmed of the Department of Architecture and Planning at Karachi’s NED University of Engineering and Technology is amongst the project’s most vociferous critics. ”The expressway was not conceived as a part of any integrated transportation planning strategy, the most important being the Karachi Development Plan (of 1973-1985),” he said.

”It was superimposed without any technical vetting and independent evaluation,” he added. ”This aspect alone is enough to render it controversial.”

From all accounts, the experiences of the tens of thousands of project-affected people who have been evicted and face eviction should be controversial enough to warrant a complete re-examination of the 500-million-rupee (about 8.7 million U.S. dollars) project.

”I put in 23 years of hard work to call a place my own and I am given only 24 hours’ notice to evict. And then, right in front of my very eyes, my lifetime’s accomplishment is bulldozed to ground ruthlessly,” was the lament of 54-year old Mohammad Zaman.

A year ago, Zaman had bought a small general store for the equivalent of 430 U.S. dollars. He had also built a house for his family of 13, which cost 2,600 U.S. dollars. ”What do I get in return?” he asked. ”Just 860 U.S. dollars and a plot of 80 square metres in a godforsaken place.”

The impact of having their homes destroyed reaches into many aspects of people’s lives. Zaman’s eldest son was set to graduate this year, but was forced to abandon his studies and work in a factory to help meet family expenses. Zaman himself works as a caretaker in a factory to earn 1.7 U.S. dollars a day.

”People who live in air-conditioned palaces have no idea what it takes to build a home that takes a whole lifetime,” Shabbir told IPS. A potter till he met with an accident and lost his fingers, he found himself forced to beg to survive.

”After four years I was able to buy a donkey and a cart and worked as a labourer,” Shabbir said. ”I’d saved enough to build a home I could finally call my own. I’d come a long way, and now what do I have? Just ruins.”

In June 2000, when the government of the province of Sindh decided to construct the expressway, Shabbir was just another statistic. By the time evictions began in January 2001, the government had estimated that almost 12,000 houses, 42 religious places including mosques, churches and temples, and 1,035 commercial premises would need to be razed to make way for the Lyari Expressway.

According to surveys conducted by the Urban Resource Centre, a Karachi-based NGO, until now more than 7,400 units (both residential and commercial) have been razed and over 30,000 have lost their jobs.

Despite opposition from those directly affected by the project and civil society groups, and despite reports filed by fact-finding missions from international NGOs like Habitat International Coalition and the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights, the bulldozing has continued.

Musarrat and her family were among the first to move from a site along the expressway to a resettlement zone. ”The government has plunged us into hell,” she said bluntly. When she and her family arrived, she said, there was no water, electricity or gas to cook with. ”Even now there is no sewage, the school has few teachers who come and go when they like, and the small dispensary is ill-equipped.”

To keep the family fed, Musarrat’s mother-in-law, now in her seventies, goes out before sunrise to look for wood. ”She comes back by nine with her hands are bleeding and sore because of the thorny bushes from where she finds the twigs for the fire,” said Musarrat. Like her neighbour Ghulam Fatema, Musarrat has been forced to sell her jewellery to make ends meet.

Those who must wait for the inevitable do so with resigned desperation. In areas that have been marked for demolition but where the razing has not begun, like in the Muslimabad Colony, Mohammad Hanif has removed the doors and windows from the walls, and has even dismantled the roof of corrugated sheeting.

He plans to ”reuse them when we are evicted to a resettlement area”. Meanwhile, Tariq Butt, a 25-year-old tailor, finds the waiting agonising for himself and his family. ”We are so scared that we think of nothing but being left out in the cold,” he said.

How many fear being left out in the cold? The fact-finding missions point to a discrepancy between the number of families to be evicted. According to the government the number is 16,000 whereas NGOs say 25,000 families will be evicted. However, there is no official list of the families to be evicted.

Without either public hearing or an environmental impact assessment study, as environmentalists claim the project lacks, Professor Ahmed has raised the question of the expressway’s very legitimacy. He speaks of the real estate windfall that awaits whichever agency controls the project area following completion.

”Previous plans showed a an allocation of about 400 feet wide [for the expressway corridor] but now it is informally reported as being more than 800 feet,” he pointed out.

This is substantiated, he said, by the demolitions done to clear the corridor. ”Obviously a major beneficiary of the project will be the agency which ‘owns’ the project, ownership that extends to the priceless land parcels created along the carriageway.”