Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: The Capital Development Authority (CDA) has disagreed to the proposal of Ministry of Capital Administration and Development Division (CADD) to establish an autonomous building control authority in the capital.

However, CDA Chairman Maroof Afzal has already directed planning wing of the authority to enforce building bylaws across the city including housing schemes.

In this regard, the CADD Ministry has sent a letter to the CDA chairman referring to a meeting held under the chair of the State Minister for CADD Dr Tariq Fazal Chaudhry.

According to said letter, in this meeting, the officials of CADD Ministry and CDA agreed to the establishment of a building control authority to implement building control bylaws across the capital.

The letter had requested the CDA chairman to initiate process to establish building control authority in the capital on the basis of the findings of aforementioned meeting.

Meanwhile, a response has also been prepared by the Human Recourse Directorate (HRD) of the CDA, a copy is available with the Daily Times, which disagrees to the proposal made by CADD Ministry and indicates that the authority is not in favour to establish a parallel and autonomous authority to implement building bylaws.

The HRD’s brief response stated that although, there is a need to establish a building control authority to implement building bylaws across the city, but it should be the under control of civic authority to avoid overlapping of function and duties. Moreover, the problem of command shall also arise, as two commands for one objective would not be suitable for the city management.

Currently, the Building Control Section is exercising the building control regulations on the plots allotted by the CDA or on the land for which the NOC has been issued by the CDA, but due to shortage of human recourse and other procedural hurdles, the building control section has not been exercising its powers over the private housing schemes of Zone II, Zone IV and Zone V. Moreover, the directorate is not exercising its control over Sector E-11.

Sources revealed that the state minister wants to establish an autonomous body to regulate building control bylaws across the city, whereas he also wants to handover the control of proposed authority to the newly formed metropolitan corporation, but the CDA higher ups are not in mood to shift an important and revenue generating section to the corporation.

Sources told Daily Times that the CDA chairman has already given a task to the member Planning and Design to find out a modus operandi to enforce building bylaws over the housing schemes of Zone-II, Zone-IV and Zone-V, which are currently run through their respective management committees under the supervision of Cooperative Societies Islamabad registrar.

Sources claimed that the planning wing is near to implement CDA’s building bylaws in aforementioned zones by establishing a new directorate within the planning wing or assigning extra task to the Building Control Directorate by enhancing its existing capacity.

While commenting on the issue, an officer of the authority said; “The establishment of another Building Control Section within authority would not only implement the building bylaws across the city, but it would also improve the vigilance of the authority over approved layout plans of housing societies.”

“After the enforcement of CDA building bylaws in housing schemes, their management committee would not be able to violate their respective approved layout plans as they would not create additional plots on the site without having prior approval of the authority, which will help the CDA to curtail conversion of public land into residential and commercial plots,” the officer added.