By Ardeshir Cowasjee

THE enlightened world is worried about global warming. Mountain glaciers are melting at an alarming rate and thus sea levels will rise. When they do, low lying lands along the coastal areas of the world will be inundated.

We have high mountains; we have glaciers. We have five mountain peaks which exceed 8,000 meters in height, 22 which exceed 7,500 meters and 46 over 7,000 meters. Have our men done any recent surveys of the state of our precarious glaciers?

The environment of the world is endangered. The environment of Pakistan is under dire threat. Potable water is a scarcity, a rarity. On Friday, our leading newspapers carried an ‘Appeal’ to the president, prime minister and Chief Justice of Pakistan, who were advised them: “As you read this, a child lies dying in hospital because of contaminated water.” The subject was “Pakistan’s waters at risk,” the appeal was threefold : that water environment standards be enforced, that the concerned agencies and industries be compelled to treat industrial and municipal wastewater, that a water quality monitoring commission be set up for the implementation of the regulatory framework. The appeal was made by seven distraught NGOs.

Now, today, an appeal has been made by many concerned citizens of Karachi to the powers that be, asking that one of the few open spaces left to us be preserved.

In the mid-1960s, sixty-two acres of a hill-top plateau, known locally as Kidney Hill, lying between Shaheed-e-Millat and Karsaz Roads was notified as a ‘Park and Recreation Area’ and named KDA Scheme 32, ‘Falaknuma’. As required under the law, a series of public notices were inserted in the press inviting objections to the scheme.

These notices stated that the Karachi Development Authority (KDA) proposed to “develop it as a recreational scheme providing a lung space for the rapidly developing city and for providing space for a water supply reservoir to cater for the need of the surrounding population. It is proposed to stop unauthorised encroachments and quarrying and to take over the entire plateau. The scheme will provide for playgrounds, horse ride path, club, restaurants, preservation of the rock to be known as Jabal Tariq as a landmark of the city, a site for water supply reservoir, gardens, a lake, tennis courts, and sites for some cultural institutions like a Science Museum or an Observatory.”

As with all open spaces in Karachi, Kidney Hill was an open invitation to the land grabbers, to what are known as ‘developers,’ and to the political parties in power. Over the years, the administration-backed mafias did their best to encroach on sections of the park or to have plots carved out and allotted in various names, so that the builders could move in. Residents of the adjacent societies, including Faran Society and Overseas Cooperative Housing Society (OCHS), consistently complaining to the concerned authorities and political ‘leaders’ and somehow, for an unexpectedly long period, land-grabbing attempts were foiled.

In 1984, implementing a 1981 directive of President General Ziaul Haq, the Kidney Hill area, which had been named Ahmed Ali Park, in remembrance of the only sensible town planner this city has had, was handed over to the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC), jointly by the federal government, the Sindh government, the Board of Revenue, secretary, housing and town planning, mayor of Karachi Abdul Sattar Afghani, KDA director-general Z A Nizami, and the managing-director of the Karachi Cooperative Housing Societies Union (KCHSU).

Over the next two decades, this action gave rise to multiple litigations between the government agencies and claimant societies and individuals. Finally, in January this year, in a Supreme Court appeal filed by the OCHS challenging the 1999 inclusion of the NGO Shehri and 13 area residents as interveners in one constitutional Petition filed in 1990 (1314/90), a five-party ‘Agreement of Settlement’ was presented sanctioning the retention of only 20 acres of Kidney Hill (now surveyed as 55 acres) as a park, and converting most of the rest into residential bungalow plots with service roads in between. Apparently, the mid-1960’s requirement for a ‘lung space’ for the then 2.5 million population of Karachi no longer existed forty years later when the city’s population had boomeranged to over 15 million.

The appeal was allowed by the Supreme Court, while giving the interveners permission to seek a separate remedy under the law.

This new ‘agreement,’ drawn up last year, was signed by the federal government through the joint secretary, ministry of housing and works, the Sindh government through the secretary, cooperation department, the city district government, Karachi (successor of the KDA and KMC) through the district coordination officer, the managing-director of the Karachi Cooperative Housing Societies Union, and the honorary secretary of the OCHS.

When presented in the High Court of Sindh, the OCHS’s case was disposed of in terms of the agreement, while allowing the former interveners a period of fifteen days to approach the court in a separate additional petition. On February 6, 2007, 13 residents of Faran Society and the OCHS through one petitioner Abdul Aziz Latif Jamal, to whom all had given their power of attorney as their representative, and Shehri filed a constitutional Petition 160/2007 before a division bench of the Sindh High Court which granted an ad interim order prohibiting the creation of third party interests in Ahmed Ali Park.

Three days later, on February 9, petitioner/attorney Abdul Aziz Latif Jamal addressed a letter to their lawyer, Barrister Gilbert Naim-ur-Rahman, which reads as follows:

“Subject : CP No.160 of 2007. Dear Sir, We regret not to elaborate a reason regarding the withdrawal/deletion of our names from the captioned petition. However, please move an application for withdrawal/deletion of our names with immediate effect.”Now, which threatening organisation could possibly have forced a conscientious law abiding citizen to withdraw and state his “regret not to elaborate a reason”? Writing in this space last Friday, Ayaz Amir had this to say : “The MQM can be admired from a distance but at close quarters it gives rise to some different feelings. Having to talk in euphemisms about it is itself a tribute to it ubiquitous power in Karachi . . .”

There are few open spaces which remain in this highly polluted sewerage and garbage-strewn city of Karachi. The parks, playgrounds, roads, graveyards, railway yards, beaches, and other amenity areas are being swiftly and deliberately encroached upon and are increasingly becoming easy prey for greedy, ignorant, couldn’t-care-less well-connected land grabbers.

One other current example is Webb Ground, a five-acre playing field in Tunisia Lines, off Sharea Faisal, opposite the Christian cemetery. Long used as an institutional sports field by the Karachi Grammar School, it was integrated into the Lines Area Redevelopment Scheme in the mid-1980s and used as a playground for the neighbourhood. In disregard of all that is proper, this amenity plot has now been leased to the Army Welfare Trust which, in further disregard of what is proper, correct and lawful, has sub-leased it to a concern known as Makro-Habib which will build on it a gigantic ‘Cash & Carry Store’. The local residents, whose children have been deprived of an open playfield and ‘lung space,’ plan to challenge this illicit conversion in court.

The fight is unending, the counter-attack remorseless.

E-mail: arfc@cyber.com.pk