The past few weeks in Karachi have seen an anti-encroachment drive that has affected livelihoods and living. Those spearheading the drive justify their actions, saying they are legal, and those using the spaces are painted as land grabbers. Meanwhile, another cause for concern is the intended clearing of land along the route of the moribund Karachi Circular Railways.

Noman Ahmed

The foremost issue is land for housing. About half a century ago, land was distributed by city authorities to various categories of urban dwellers according to their need. Land use was determined on the basis of individual and collective social requirements. Today, land is acquired through clout, capital and clandestine coercion of the institutions concerned.

The poor cannot acquire land through purchase or force as they possess neither surplus capital nor political influence. The state institutions have a responsibility to ensure the poor can access the land market. Existing legal instruments such as the fair implementation of Sindh Katchi Abadis Authority (SKAA) Act, 1987, is an option.

Karachi’s poor must have the legal right to live and operate.

This law was promulgated during the tenure of prime minister Mohammad Khan Junejo. The objective of the law was to regularise those squatter settlements which had come up and evolved till March 1985 (revised to June 1997), that existed in ecologically safe locations, had acquired the approval of the land-owning agency/ department concerned, and comprised over 40 households. By implementing the law, more than 300 squatter settlements were regularised. The past few years have seen the work of regularisation slowing down due administrative reasons.

As migrations to the city have continued unabated, survey and subsequent regularisation of squatter settlements must be undertaken along scientific lines. With advanced digital mapping tools available, the exercise can be done with greater accuracy.

In the absence of an institutionalised option of accessing shelter, Karachi’s poor developed settlements on left-over and marginal land. An elitist view of such neighbourhoods — referred to as katchi abadis — is that they are breeding grounds and safe havens for criminals and the inhabitants are not deserving of social interaction with the rest. In other words, katchi abadis are looked upon with contempt and as an eyesore. They are viewed as a part of the problem, not the solution.

In fact, katchi abadis are not built with criminal intent, isolated cases notwithstanding. They emerge from unusual sites as there are no alternative locations. When the residents of settlements along the KCR were interviewed recently, they said as much.

The right to run hawker stalls, small- to medium-sized shops and other services also require serious review. The poor do not have the means to purchase or rent shops and commercial spaces that are formally available. But their services and merchandise are needed in shopping areas, transport terminals, business districts, railway stations and traffic junctions.

In many parts of the world, open public spaces are made available to hawkers according to land-utilisation plans. These plans demarcate the limits and conditions within which vending activity is allowed. In India, the Street Vendors Act, 2014, is an important legislative tool that regulates this activity in urban areas. A town-vending committee, with representatives of street hawkers, is constituted to oversee the management of vending activity. Matters relating to space adjustments, vending licences and extortion and bribery are dealt with by the committee. Similar laws and provisions exist in the UK, the US and many other countries.

Sindh can consider introducing an amendment in the existing local government laws to make provisions for vending activity to exist on formal and legal grounds. The affectees of various anti-encroachment operations should be documented and accommodated in formally created places to save them from financial destruction.

The provincial government and KMC must identify locations for setting up temporary bazaars to facilitate vendors and retailers in areas where a greater number of shops and stalls have been razed. The design and construction of stalls should ensure both functionality and aesthetics. Women entrepreneurs and sales staff must be encouraged. The same support should be extended to the disabled.

Image lifting and communication is another strategy that can help in scaling up the operations of such bazaars. Innovative ads and campaigns can be designed to boost commercial potential. Introduction of banking kiosks and provision of credit card facility can enhance the performance of bazaars. Similarly bazaars can also become tools for stretching target subsidies in underprivileged localities.

The writer is chairman, Department of Architecture & Planning, NED University, Karachi.

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

It was sadly ironic that on Dec 27, 2016, while the political leadership of Sindh was busy taking a dig at their political rivals, the Supreme Court’s Karachi Registry was constituting a judicial commission to investigate the poor state of drinking water in Pakistan’s largest city. The two-judge bench, headed by Justice Amir Hani Muslim, asked the Sindh High Court chief justice to nominate a serving high court judge to head the commission.

Noman Ahmed

Some of the core problems include: acute shortage at the bulk supply level; increase in water theft and leakages; institutional shortcomings due to unsatisfactory performance by the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board (KWSB); financial handicaps faced by the water utility; an exponential rise in the operations of water tankers (especially during the peak of summer); aging and decrepit pipeline network; lack of a comprehensive maintenance and network rehabilitation plan for older neighbourhoods; and the inability of KWSB to add more fresh water connections in suburbs and elsewhere.

Karachi increases by 0.6 million people annually, but the water supply does not scale up correspondingly.

However, ground realities have to be addressed with the right depth and perspective, which is often missed in some of these deliberations.

About half of Karachi’s population resides in Orangi, Baldia, Qasba, Korangi and Landhi. The water supply situation at the retail level is one of the worst in these localities. People living here have no option but to purchase expensive water through tankers after setting aside other essential priorities in spending. This diminishes the possibility of escaping from the poverty spiral. Options for access to water include erratic supply (where pipelines exist), collusion with area gangs who puncture water mains for commercial sales, boring and the use of semi-brackish water and purchasing tanker loads.

Karachi adds more than 0.6 million people to its tally every year, but the bulk water supply does not scale up correspondingly. For the past many years, the supply has been static at 550m gallons per day (mgd) against a standing demand of 1.1 billion mgd. Less than one-third of the consumers pay the water bill, even though it is charged at an extremely low tariff. The biggest defaulters of KWSB include federal and provincial governments; they owe the utility over Rs22bn.

The culture of non-payment has now trickled down to the level of the ordinary consumer. A study by this writer revealed that many folks considered urban piped water a gift of nature that does not need any monetary compensation! Sometime ago, the KWSB managing director was reported to have complained that 95pc of over 200,000 mosques and imambargahs in the city do not pay their bills.

On the other hand, the water tanker operators are able to recover much of the revenue for the over 50,000 tanker trips that are estimated to take place every single day. Most of these transactions are informal and cash based in nature, the proceeds of which are believed to be shared amongst the many layers of influential stakeholders.

The water supply is also facilitated through illegal hydrants developed by informal entrepreneurs. In this scenario, the quality of water is below the desirable level that would be suitable for consumption. Where water lines and supply do manage to work in concert, it is only after illegally installing suction pumps. Very limited action on this is taken by the concerned authorities despite the gravity of the situation. The bottled water business is another beneficiary of the breakdown of the water supply in the huge city. A multimillion-rupee enterprise, it thrives without any regulatory control.

The reform agenda for the water supply in the city must be prepared according to a realistic perspective. The KWSB board may be reconstituted in order to make it practical and relevant with respect to providing policy guidance to the utility. The addition of relevant stakeholders such as civil society organisations linked to water and sanitation, prominent professionals, representatives of trade bodies and developers may also be considered a part of this exercise. The recovery of bills may be considered as packaged services for targeted outsourcing. That could help raise the much-needed operational revenue for the board.

KWSB must make efforts to help acquire a brand name and status so that competent engineers and management professionals are encouraged to join it, which would bolster its human resource. A multipronged strategy must be worked out to invite interns — comprising technicians, engineering and management students — to the water and sewerage board. The latter’s consumer relations must be upgraded, in which the creation of a robust complaint redressal mechanism is essential.

This unit should be geographically decentralised in order to address the range of operational grievances filed by respective consumers. Policy decisions related to tariff and operational privileges of tanker operators must be worked out so as to be more structured rather than ad hoc and laissez faire as they appear to be at present.

KWSB must negotiate with the bulk consumers, including the government agencies, to work out the schedule repayment of pending dues. The water board may consider preparing a business plan to fully utilise the options of water and sanitation related and other possibilities for revenue generation. The powers that be must note that Karachi, with a dysfunctional water supply, will not be able to shoulder strategic responsibilities in the wake of the implementation of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor project.

The writer is chairman, Department of Architecture & Planning, NED University, Karachi.
Published in Dawn, December 30th, 2016

Urbanisation in Pakistan has been moving at a swift pace, albeit in a rudderless fashion. The Planning Commission estimates that half of our population shall be living in cities by 2030. Among other impacts, the approach and conduct of land governance shall drastically change for the worse, clear evidence of which is visible even today.

When Pakistan came into being in 1947, 17pc of our population lived in cities. The land, infrastructure and routine affairs of urban centres were managed according to the systems and institutions inherited from the British Raj. Municipal corporations and committees oversaw the routines of urban management and kept records of new developments as per regular procedures. Urban boundaries were well articulated and land categories of peri-urban, agricultural, forest and other typologies of land well documented.

For addressing urban problems of extraordinary significance, urban improvement trusts were set up.

Following tradition, the Karachi Improvement Trust (KIT) was founded in 1951 to deal with issues of housing and settlement of incoming refugees and newcomers to the city. The government transformed KIT to the Karachi Development Authority (KDA) in 1957 to deal with expanded issues of urban planning, development and procurement of vital infrastructure. Mechanisms were devised to prevent speculation or land hoarding by prospective monopolists. The same approach was followed in Lahore, Hyderabad, Islamabad and other large cities in the country.

Planning controls, regulatory capacity and resolve to safeguard urban and peri-urban land assets have weakened since the late 1970s. At the macroeconomic level, the Bhutto government nationalised enterprises and production houses, leaving fewer options for businessmen to invest in. The rapid rise in remittances from overseas Pakistanis created an instant demand for investment in lucrative but secure ventures. Since manufacturing, industries, commercial and trading enterprises were viewed as high-risk options, a natural shift occurred towards land and housing initiatives. Large swathes of land, which were allocated for non-urban uses, were gradually taken over by urban land uses.

Plot development schemes were promoted by different government agencies, military authorities and private developers. Over the last three decadesthe status of land has changed from being a collective benefit asset to a saleable commodity, under the control and ownership of rich and powerful investors a trend which has intensified. In this process of laissez-faire land transactions, public regulatory controls, checks and balances have been muted and rendered completely ineffective.

During the 1970-90s period, urban development authorities routinely prepared urban plans for projecting land uses by extrapolating from the existing urban situation. These plans were neither notified nor given potent legal cover. Chief ministers usually retained controls to decide on land distribution, adjustments in uses, jurisdictional considerations and even welfare functions. A legally validated plan would be a hurdle in the exercise of such discretionary powers. Therefore, urban planning assignments were reduced to being merely of academic value, and the government failed to implement vital recommendations.

For example, successive urban plans for Karachi recommended preserving the land use of the eastern and northern peripheries as green agricultural territories wisely to maintain environmental balance, food production, and for the consolidation of value-added agricultural livelihoods for the rural population. In total violation of this urban planning prescription, the administration has allowed megascale real-estate schemes to be developed by private and military agencies along the Super Highway.

After dubiously expropriating farmlands and pastures, these leapfrog ventures have redeEned the urban limits of Karachi to its farthest territorial end.

While Lahore`s planners have categorically insisted on controlling urban sprawl to safeguard invaluable farmland along the southern edges, the same has been swiftly converted into housing schemes for upper income groups, overseas investors and other socioeconomic classes of power and privilege.

Unplanned densification of inner city locations and central city residential areas is another anomaly. In 2002, the City District Government of Karachi (now defunct) promulgated the commercialisation of roads policy to allow changes of densities and land use for a few important streets and roads. Under this ill-conceived initiative, more and more streets are allowed to experience high-density,high-rise development alongside residential plots.

The provisions for upgradinginfrastructure,feasibility of urban services along the corridor, parking facilities for visitors, and possibilities of sporadic densification of other streets were not considered.

Sharea Faisal, Shahrah-i-Pakistan, Tariq Road, Khalid Bin Waleed Road, Shaheed-i-Millat Road, Shahrah-i-Quaideen and Khayaban-i-Iqbal display a stockpile of new, and under-construction, tall buildings. Once these buildings are occupied, there shall be severe impacts on traffic flow, pedestrian movement and urban services.

A few days ago, the mad rush of consumers to a just opened department store caused a total traffic jam along Rashid Minhas Road. Lil(ewise in Lahore, Main Boulevard in Gulberg and many other arteries show high-scale densification. In these strident physical transformations, heritage sites are not spared. Commercial developments taking place in southern parts of Karachi have caused damage to public heritage sites such as the Jehangir Kothari Parade and Shri Ratneshwar Mahadev Temple.

Statutes such as Sindh High Density Board Act provide sweeping powers for the executive to fiddle with land use and density, almost at will.

Urbanisation will continue to rise and thus the intention to turn cities and hinterlands into supermarkets of real-estate products. Some steps are vital to stem the rot. A provincial spatial plan must be prepared for each province to identify existing urban footprints, cite locations suitable for expansion of urban development, and pinpoint territories where urban development must be forbidden.

All land uses, according to scientifically validated criteria, must be addressed for its present and future projections. Local governments must be instituted and empowered to manage urban lands and territories according to these plans. Investment options in other sectors must be devised in order to ease pressure on urban development. Necessary targeting must be done to absorb the urban poor in specially designed housing schemes.

It must be remembered that land is a finite asset.

If we lose those categories of land which are vital to support our food production and environmental equilibrium, we threaten our very existence.

The writer is chairman, Department of Architecture & Planning, NED University, Karachi.

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan