New Balakot City remains an elusive dream

Locals claim billions allocated for reconstruction spent only on salaries and perks of officials

BALAKOT: Nearly 12 years after the devastating earthquake of 2005 destroyed around 95 per cent of the infrastructure the Balakot city was destroyed, the city remains dilapidated.

A general survey of the quake-hit town shows that hundreds of families are still living in temporary shelters, waiting for the government to provide them with the homes they had been promised.

Scores of children are still studying under the open skies; their schools destroyed in the earthquake have yet to be reconstructed.

Similarly, the Tehsil Headquarters Hospital too waits for the arrival of builders to reconstruct the hospital over a decade after it was razed to the ground by the powerful tremblor which claimed 74,500 lives, and injured over 100,000 and left 3.3 million homeless.



The Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority (ERRA) continues to face public criticism over the slow pace of work.

The federal government had allocated Rs7 billion for the authority in the budget for Fiscal Year 2016-17 and Rs7.5 billion in 2017-18. However, locals say they have yet to see where in the city were those funds spent except for the salaries and perks handed to ERRA staff.

Sources said that the local leadership of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), after pursuing K-P Chef Minister Pervez Kahttak for months, finally managed to secure an assurance from the chief minister that he would write a letter to Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi for convening a meeting of the ERRA Council to take up the issue of Balakaot’s incomplete reconstruction.

They said that Khattak had assured them that once the council meets, the PTI-led government will seek to fast-track work on the New Balakot City.

The construction of a new city had been proposed by geologists after the 2005 earthquake. According to local and international experts, who had converged on the flattened city for assisting reconstruction and rehabilitation, Balakot city was termed unsafe for construction and was declared a red zone.

Experts warned that Balakot lies on two fault lines which go all the way to Pattan, Hindukush Mountains and Muzaffarabad. These fault lines can trigger another earthquake at any time and therefore it was declared imperative to move Balakot and Gurlat town - spread over 1,400 acres - to safer grounds.

According to residents of Balakot, they were denied the right to rebuild their homes, by declaring the city as a red zone. But the promised alternative space of ‘New Balakot City’ was never completed.

The government under former dictator General (retired) Pervez Musharraf had decided in 2007 to stop rehabilitation of Balakot and Gurlat and shifted people onto alternative land in Bakrial. In this regard, over 11,436 kanals of land were procured and their owners were dully paid compensation.

However, the people of Bakrial, even after taking payments for their land, refused to move and the idea of New Bakrial City also tanked with only 1,500 plots allotted instead of the planned 5,000 plots.

Like the unmet promise of New Balakot City, the area people said, over 200 schools of Mansehra, which were destroyed in the earthquake, have not been reconstructed. At least 12 batches of matriculates have passed studying under open skies.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 23^rd, 2017.