Planning deficiencies: After failing for 13 years, CDA to outsource Sector I-15’s designing

Officials fear costs to balloon for hiring consultant with no action taken against those responsible for delays

ISLAMABAD: The top civic authority in the capital has failed to finalise the design of Sector I-15, planned to house low-income families, nearly 13 years after it was first announced.

Now, the Capital Development Authority (CDA) has decided to hire a consultant to prepare a design for the sector.

This is per what has become a general practice of outsourcing design work and spending billions for preparing drawings despite having a full-fledged design wing complete with eight directorates, a deputy director general (DDG) and a Director General (DG).

“The design cost of the project has quadrupled and this increased cost would ultimately be endured by the public exchequer or the public directly,” CDA sources told The Express Tribune on the condition of anonymity.

Moreover, they lamented that there was no accountability of CDA officials who were responsible for the inordinate delay in preparing a design of the sector over the past 13 years.

The project had been first launched in 2005 when it was envisioned to have projects with small flats which will be sold to low-income groups including lower-grade government employees. As many as 8,000 applicants had invested in the scheme.



The authority had announced that fully-constructed flats would be available at a subsided rate of Rs1.4 million, which could be paid in easy instalments.

The project, though, never materialised and the hard-earned money of hundreds of low-income families was stuck.

At that time, the then-CDA management with Kamran Lashari as the chairman, allegedly put money of the investors into the stock markets but was lost due to a tumultuous market.

Meanwhile, the cost of construction and housing material continued to soar, forcing the authority to abandon the project, terming it financially unfeasible. During this period, the CDA continued to receive installments from applicants.

Ultimately, the CDA offered to completely refund those who had deposited the money. But only 3,350 out nearly 8,000 applicants opted for the refund.

For the rest, the CDA announced, it will provide them each with residential plots measuring 138 square yards in Sector I-15 in lieu of flats.

On June 17, 2013, during the tenure of former chairperson Tahir Shahbaz, the CDA board decided to re-plan the sector to create small residential plots to accommodate the nearly 4,000 affectees of the low-cost housing scheme.

But this new plan too faced significant delays.

In 2016, CDA decided to hold computerised balloting for these plots. Affected families hoped they would at least be given a plot number after waiting for compensation for nearly 11 years.

Affectees deplored the state-of-affairs at CDA, accusing the city’s managers of only focusing on settling issues of posh sectors where plots were sold for millions of rupees and meant for the rich only while the investment of poor and low-income families mattered little.



The federal government had approved the sector in November 1992, with land for it being acquired from local residents in 1968-69. Although it was announced 24 years ago, the authority has yet to lay basic civic and road infrastructure there.

In the past, several attempts were made to issue tenders for developmental work in the sector, but for one reason or the other, it never materialised.

Even, in 2006, the sector’s infrastructure development work was estimated to cost around Rs1.16 billion. A tender was awarded to a local contractor on a turn-key basis but contractor failed to execute the project.

Now, the CDA hopes to change the design, which could prove to be a costly proposition even as no one has been held responsible for past failures and accrued losses.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, May 30^th, 2018.