MQM-P moves court for SITE phase II completion in Hyd

Work on project has been stalled for almost a decade

HYDERABAD:

The Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQMP) has approached the Sindh High Court over delay in the development of SITE phase II in Hyderabad, with work on the project remaining stalled for almost a decade.

MQM-P MPA Nadeem Ahmed Siddiqui and Hyderabad Chamber of Small Trade and Small Industry vice-president Sikandar filed a petition pertaining to the matter through advocate Dilawar Qureshi in the high court on Friday. The petition, however, was not admitted for hearing till the filing of this report. Speaking to the media outside the court, Siddiqui said the SITE Limited launched the project in 2008. The phase II, or the extension of the project, spreads over 300 acres of land and bordering the phase I, comprises 250 plots, each priced at Rs1.5 million.

Siddiqui said the buyers were asked to pay 50 per cent of the plots' price in advance and the remaining in installments, starting from 2011. Then, a scheme, titled the development of infrastructure in new extension area, SITE Hyderabad, was included in the list of non-Annual Development Programmes in the budget for the year 2008-09. According to Siddiqui, the SITE Limited got advertisements published in 2015 to invite tenders for the construction of a boundary wall around the project's extension. The work, which was supposed to be completed in six months, has not been started so far, even after a passage of around five years, he decried. "The business community has so far paid around Rs350 million to the SITE Limited," he claimed.

The MPA decried that he had raised the issue in the Sindh Assembly as well as with the provincial government, but to no avail. "If the extension was timely developed after 2008, the new industries would have generated 18,000 to 20,000 new jobs," he contended. Siddique argued that the SITE Limited, by delaying the completion of the extension, had caused a loss of billions of rupees to the national exchequer in the form of taxes, which the industries in the estate would have paid hitherto. The petitioners have prayed the court to order the SITE Limited to complete the project within six months and to desist from selling, transferring, allotting or leasing the plots in question.