Ring Road affectees stage protest on GT Road
A group of people likely to be affected by the Rawalpindi Ring Road staged a protest on Grand Trunk (GT) Road seeking realignment of the mega project.
The protesters said they will block the GT Road if the government continues to ignore their concerns about the project that was expected to put many villages, graveyards, agricultural land and orchards under tarmac.
The Ring Road affectees standing on the side of GT Road said that as of now, their protest demonstration was symbolic, however, a heavy contingent of the police reached the site to prevent any untoward incident.
The demonstrators said that the project would destroy their ancestral lands while dozens of families would become homeless. The protesters complained that the government had fixed extremely low prices for their arable lands which were not acceptable.
The provincial government has set the compensation of Rs69,000 to Rs350,000 per Kanal as per the location of the property which will go under the highway and the projects planned along with it. The people affected by the project have the right to challenge the official assessment before a civil judge and file an application for reassessment.
However, the protestors said that Rawalpindi Commissioner Muhammad Mehmood and Deputy Commissioner (DC) Anwarul Haq lent a deaf ear to the reservations of the people affected by the project, they said.
The protesters said that they would stage a protest by blocking GT Road from Rawat if the demands were not fulfilled.
They called for the government to refrain from evicting the people who were living there for ages and instead carry out little required changes in alignment and design of the Ring Road project.
Meanwhile, Land Acquisition Collector Wasim said that some Rs60 million worth of compensation has been received by the landowners displaced due to the planned construction of the Rawalpindi Ring Road project. The provincial government has acquired around 6,000 Kanals of land stretching from Radio Pakistan Interchange on GT Road to Kheri Mor in the first phase of Rawalpindi Ring Road.
Published in The Express Tribune, March 30th, 2021.