CDA pins hope on tribunal to resume work

Officials say attempts to parley with EPA chief were snubbed

ISLAMABAD: After having chopped down hundreds of trees along the Ataturk Avenue on the pretext of expansion work, the civic authority has been unable to resume work on the project.

Last year, the mass felling of trees along Ataturk Avenue had created a furore in the Capital.

Apart from environmentalists, the national only human rights body, the National Commission on Human Rights (NCHR), right activists and civil society and the Islamabad High Court (IHC) had all taken notice of the issue.

Curiously, the Environment Protection Agency (Pak-EPA) had in February 2016, issued No-Objection Certificates (NOC) to the Capital Development Authority (CDA) to go ahead with the project. But after the judiciary and civil society raised objections over the move, the chief environmental watchdog decided to join the chorus of critics and issued an Environmental Protection Order (EPO) to CDA, apparently for face-saving.



“Pak-EPA had issued an EPO regarding the project even after issuing an NOC after holding a public hearing,” A CDA official said.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Climate Change (MoCC) and the CDA had launched a plantation drive in an attempt to compensate for the trees it planned to remove along the road. Court documents and CDA officials repeatedly stated that for the 291 trees that the civic authority planned to remove from along the Ataturk Avenue, it would be planting nearly ten times as many trees or around 2,640 trees.

However, the CDA neither appeared before the Environmental Protection Tribunal (EPT) nor did it file an appeal against the EPO notice issued by the Pak-EPA. Ultimately, construction work on the project was delayed.

CDA officials told The Express Tribune that they had approached the Pak-EPA director general (DG) to resolve the matter. The Pak-EPA official, after making CDA officials wait for a long time, snubbed them.

“After waiting for a long time, the DG finally told our team that she would not meet with them,” the CDA officials told The Express Tribune on the condition of anonymity.



CDA Director Environment Irfan Niazi, however, said that last week the CDA had submitted all the relevant documents to the EPT.

Niazi hoped that now the tribunal would decide the matter in their favour and that they will be able to resume work on the project by June.

Delays to push up costs

A CDA official in the road wing suggested that the delay the project had faced could escalate the cost of the project significantly.

According to environmental impact assessment (EIA) report, CDA approved to cut 291 trees but 190 trees were cut off from Khayaban-e-Suhrawardy to Jinnah Avenue.

CDA officials claim that owing to an increase in the number of vehicles plying the Embassy Road over the past few years, there was a severe traffic problem on the road with commuters frequently seen trapped in long queues of vehicles on the road during rush hour.

CDA officials have suggested expanding the road in order to ease the traffic pressure on the route.

Former CDA chairman and the incumbent Islamabad Metropolitan Corporation (IMC) Mayor Sheikh Anser Aziz, had even performed the groundbreaking of the project in August 2017.



However, after the court directed to remove permanent barricades on Service Road East at the juncture of Fazal-e-Haq Road, the traffic flow has since somehow has eased on Embassy Road.

But with the population of the capital more than doubling to over two million, per the latest population census, officials still believe that expanding the road is the only viable permanent solution.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 28^th, 2018.