Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: A complex, lengthy and ambiguous process of the allotment of alternative plots against acquired land of the local inhabitants in the capital city has turned into a profitable business for an ‘influential mafia’.

Nowadays, one can easily find members of the said mafia in the surroundings of Land and Rehabilitation Directorate in the Capital Development Authority (CDA), including property dealers, officers of the civic body, elected representatives and journalists, but it is difficult to spot a few real affectees among dozens present there regularly.

“The CDA adjusts the claims of local inhabitants against the acquisition of their land as per multiple policies announced by the civic authority time to time in the past. If somebody asked even from the Member Estate CDA to brief about these policies, he can’t recalled all of these policies and formulas,” a land owners told The Daily Times.

An outdated, redundant and colonial system all the way from Iqbal Hall to the office of Member Estate is in place to allot the plots worth of millions. A real sufferer usually prefers to sell his land documents in raw form to this ‘influential mafia’ because the forwarding of files on merit without bribing the officers concerned is near to impossible.

This ‘influential mafia’ get processed the cases in convince with CDA officers and managed to obtain the allotment of plots on places of their own choice. Once a file has been matured, the mafia sells it in the market even two or three times higher rate than it purchased from real affectees.

A number of incidents of manhandling were happened in land directorates when real land affectees got angry over the impediments of prevailing system.

A year after it was imposed, CDA had lifted the ban on allotting alternative plots to citizens in exchange for the plots that were acquired from them under a new standard operating procedure (SOP).

However, the local inhabitants are quite convinced that the new SOPs are not working properly because the protection of real affectees is once again ignored and there is no check and balance to restrict the role of ‘influential mafia’.

“The authority itself again and again introduces a process of complex nature to make it impossible for real owners to get processed their cases and providing room to property mafia for bargain with them”, an officer of the authority commented.

“Why the authority is not putting a ban on carrying files of land affectees by strangers. If a patwari can refuse to share the details of any specific property except the real owners than why the authority entertaining property dealers roaming in and outside the land directorate”, he questioned.

Member Estate Khushal Khan was contacted but he was unavailable for comments.

Published in Daily Times, August 17^th 2017.