EDHI Foundation seeks govt help to retrieve its land

The plot is earmarked for a mortuary and an IT centre in Hyderabad

HYDERABAD: The Edhi Foundation has appealed to the higher judiciary and provincial government to help them vacate a plot, earmarked for a mortuary and an information technology centre, in Hyderabad from alleged squatters. In a letter the Foundation's Hyderabad zonal head, Meraj Ahmed, made supplication to the authorities to intervene as the alleged encroachment has continued for longer than two decades.

"The land was earmarked by late Abdul Sattar Edhi for mortuary and for setting up an information technology centre to impart free learning to deserving youth," he stated. "But because of encroachment the two projects cannot be undertaken."

According to Ahmed, Brazil donated six cabinets of cold storage for the mortuary in Hyderabad in 2001 but because of space constraints the cabinets were shifted to Quetta.



Ahmed apprised that Hyderabad Municipal Corporation in 1986 handed over possession of the 74,962 square feet plot in Markani Para area along Autobahn Road to Trust Disabled Persons as an amenity plot.

However, the Trust's Syed Sabir Ali Bukhari though constructed a building named, Apna Ghar, he could not run the facility and passed on the property to the Edhi Foundation in June 1990. "The encroachment on the land began from as early as 1991 and since then the foundation has been confronting one squatter after another," read the letter.

At present, the plot's 20,000 sq ft area is being utilised for the Bilquis Edhi Hospital, while 15,000 sq ft is under encroachment where a dozen persons have built shops, homes and other structures.

"The way towards the hospital and remaining 39,962 sq ft unused plot remains blocked by the squatters," he claimed. "The squatters also frighten patients due to which the number of patients visiting the out-patient department (OPD) has dropped from around 150 per day to 60 or 70 per day."

Ahmed said that the Foundation has been dragged to courts in half a dozen separate petitions over ownership of the plot. "Sindh High Court in April 2018 disposed of two separate petitions filed against the Foundation while deciding the case in Foundation's favour.

The court even fined the petitioners over Rs200,000 each for making false claims," he said.



"This court even suggested the counsel for the applicants to show any file or document but the learned counsel failed to do so and insisted that the applicants are old occupiers of the property and, therefore, they should be treated as owners of the same," the court observed in its April 2018 order. "... which obviously is of no legal consequence in particular when both the lower courts and in other cases also, the applicants have been declared encroachers of land and bent to misuse the process of law time and again."  He lamented that following the order, the Foundation has been unsuccessfully running from pillar to post requesting different officials of the district administration and the police to take action against the squatters.

"The officials are dilly-dallying. It takes months to get an officer to agree for an action but then that officer is transferred," he bemoaned.

"Over a dozen encroachers who are patronised by local influential and political people have encroached over the land," he claimed.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 1^st, 2018.