Daily Times

The scenes of shanties being bulldozed by the Capital Development Authority (CDA) in Islamabad have made everyone sombre. The CDA was given the task of removing illegal settlements in the outskirts of the Capital in Sector-I/11. An anti-encroachment operation backed by police personnel and Rangers razed hundreds of makeshift dwellings, leaving their inhabitants in utter distress. Though the residents resisted the drive, they failed to stop them. All that left was debris and hopeless souls, who were looking for shelter under the open sky. In order to understand this sad episode, we need to go back to the past when then prime minister Muhammad Khan Junejo had declared all Katchi Abadis (informal settlements) regularised in 1985 due to the difficulty of relocating all their dwellers. That was not a solution to end illegal squatter colonies. That is the reason the government is still grappling with the problem even after almost three decades, obviously due to the absence of a clear policy and a lack of planning that are mainly responsible for these uncalled for tragedies.

A major influx of Afghan refugees since the 1980s exacerbated this problem. At that time, no one cared about this issue and the Afghans were given a free choice to go anywhere in Pakistan. In addition, the increasing prices of land and migration of a growing number of people from the rural to the urban areas have exacerbated the situation. Now, you can see such informal settlements and slums existing in almost all big cities of the country. The housing crisis has become a grave issue in the country. The rich have ample resources to find accommodation of their choice while those belonging to the middle class also somehow manage to get homes. It is the poor, who only earn enough to barely keep body and soul together, who cannot accumulate enough wealth to acquire proper housing. They are forced therefore to cling to little patches of ground to build their makeshift dwellings to shelter themselves and their families. The government needs to understand that the demolition of the homes of slum-dwellers is not a solution to the problem. It is sheer injustice with the poor. They too are citizens of this country and it is the government’s responsibility to provide them with affordable housing, given that the constitution provides the right to shelter, albeit this too is a right practiced more in the breach. Before launching such drives, the government should have made arrangements to relocate the displaced victims. And last but not the least, the government should evolve a clear policy and conduct proper planning to address the question of shelter, especially for the poor. *