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VIEW: Capital issue — Q Isa Daudpota

EIAs, like ISO certifications, are a racket in Pakistan. Companies who do these generally train the company seeking certification to follow paperwork requirements but the real spirit is absent

Islamabad’s Capital Development Authority (CDA) is flushed with money from the sale of high-priced real estate, which it is allowed to spend on its projects. These only require the approval of an eight-member board, which has no public representation. While they may be men of extensive experience, their theoretical knowledge of modern urban planning and management is not adequate to run a large city efficiently.

Fundamental to good urban management is the idea of holistic planning. This takes into account inter-linkages of different systems within and external to the city. Upper-most is the idea of sustainability, which determines the scale of a city’s size, based on its resource-base and the ability to manage the complex interacting systems that form the city.

Development should take place at a human scale which is in harmony with nature and backed by good management and public participation. Given the scarcity of good, honest managers in Pakistan and the lack of good institutional systems, Islamabad is already larger than can be managed properly — making it as big as in the original plan of the 1960s would lead to further chaos. Rather than focusing on expansion, CDA ought to improve and maintain what exists.

With population pressure rising, there is a need to build new independent towns and cities in the vicinity of the capital. Electronic communication between cities should be used to reduce vehicular traffic between and within these new developments.

Islamabad itself urgently needs an efficient public transport system. Merely widening roads, as has been done with great abandon cutting into green belts in the city, is short-sighted and wasteful.

The government has failed to factor the real social and environmental cost of cheap loans for cars, which is now evident in the pollution and overcrowding of roads in Islamabad. The impact is far worse in other cities. Here then is a stark example of compartmentalised planning, which failed to see the impact of low-interest loans on the environment.

Our planners are ever-ready to make a beeline for grand projects. The nature and huge scale of such a project can be assessed by visiting its website: www.thecentaurus.com, where its picture is shown to appear on the prestigious government annual publication, the Pakistan Economic Survey 2006-2007, with the caption ‘Centaurus — The Identity of Pakistan’.

At the public hearing to assess the environmental impact assessment of the project, its managing director said that this project carried out the vision espoused by President Pervez Musharraf of transforming the skyline of Islamabad. The idea being that high-rise luxury buildings are a marker of progress! The MD was reminded that a Kakul-educated general or an imported banker are neither qualified nor entitled to impose their idea of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ on the capital. Only the people and city development experts ought to do this.

For many who are conscious of the environment and issues of fairness and equity, the Centaurus mega-project is inappropriate for a poor, resource-strapped country. To set up a luxury structure wholly for the elite, using significant public money to provide it with utilities and other subsidiary facilities, is hugely divisive. It sports a 7-star hotel aping the extravagance of the Gulf. This is a city that has made no decent provision for its labourers and poorer sections of the population who live in unauthorised katchi abadis within and on the outskirts. Such a stark differential in provisions for the rich and poor only creates ill-will, leading to societal instability.

The other issue is the huge physical size of the project which dwarfs everything in its surroundings. It goes against a truism that small is beautiful. Only when structures and systems are of a human scale, and within the management capability of those whose job it is to manage them, should they be set up. The demand by Centaurus on water, sewage disposal and electricity will be unprecedented, and will strain the already suffering and malfunctioning systems of the city.

The Pakistan Environment Protection Act stipulates that no work can begin on the site until an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is completed along with its public hearing and the satisfaction of the Pakistan Environmental Protection Authority (PEPA). This has been violated. Further, Hagler Bailly, the company that did the EIA, saw a large amount of digging being done during the period it was working on the assessment, considered it illegal, but continued to remain associated with the project. In their report, they state that no work should have started before proper clearance by PEPA. But by not withdrawing from the project while considering it illegal, it is clear that the current EIA report is ‘poisoned’ and should not be accepted by PEPA. Ideally, a new report ought to be commissioned.

EIAs, like ISO certifications, are a racket in Pakistan. Companies who do these generally train the company seeking certification to follow paperwork requirements but the real spirit is absent. EIA companies, for example, are not even required to be certified by the Pakistan Engineering Council, or any such body. Almost anyone can set up shop to do EIAs. The almost non-existent number of rejected EIAs by PEPA will give some idea of how this system is given to huge distortion.

PEPA itself is weak and under the thumb of the Ministry of Environment, often headed by rather ill-informed and less-than-honest ministers. There is an urgent need to strengthen it and to make it autonomous.

The author is an Islamabad-based physicist with an interest in issues of environment, education and science

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