No political pressure on encroachments: DCO

LAHORE:

The City District Government Lahore (CDGL) is launching, what it calls its ‘grand operation’ against the encroachments, on Friday.

Ahad Cheema, the district coordination officer (DCO) told The Express Tribune that the CDGL hoped the campaign would be a success.

He said it was too early to predict the outcomes. He said he realized that it was hard to make Lahore an encroachment-free city, “though not impossible.”

Cheema said that the CDGL had planned to start removing encroachments from the main arteries.

The CDGL has been advertising the campaign in print and electronic media for the last week. He asserted that there was no political interference in the infrastructural decision making.

“Some officials try to hide their poor performance by seeking orders from politicians or higher authorities. They do not make the necessary efforts to remove the encroachments to favour their own connections”, he said.

Cheema regretted that such officials did not realise how their self-interest was creating problems for the citizens.

A shopkeeper at the Urdu Bazaar, who has taken up extra land on a secondary road, told The Tribune that an official of the Data Gunj Baksh Town had advised him to temporarily windup the encroachment on his own.

He said he was told to take up the space once the campaign started losing momentum. A CDGL official said that the officials’ and citizens’ expectations from the campaign were not high.

He said some politicians opposed the campaign considering it might result in losing them votes.

“The chief minister’s dream of turning Lahore into Paris seems to remain a dream as far as encroachments are concerned,” he said.

He said a CDGL survey showed that 42,598 kanals out of 381,912 kanals of government land in the Lahore district.

The encroachers have encroached 8,944 kanals of the provincial government land, 28,765 kanals of the federal government land, 1,592 kanals of Auqaf Department and 3,297 kanals of land that belongs to the public sector departments.

When asked, he failed to provide the date when the survey was done.

Zubair Saeed, a citizen, said that the anti encroachment campaigns always failed due to the political pressures. “I hope this time the chief minister is determined to remove the encroachments,” he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 10^th, 2011.