Fear of dispossession: Flood victims’ petition hearing adjourned

Welfare Board seeks time for comments.

KARACHI: The hearing of a petition by flood victims from different cities of Sindh, against a move to dispossess them from the flats they had been allocated in Karachi, was adjourned for 10 days by a division bench of Sindh High Court on Thursday as the counsel for the Sindh Workers Welfare Board sought time to file comments.

The bench granted time to the Welfare Board’s counsel while extending the interim order restraining the authorities from taking any action till the next hearing.

The petitioners maintain that they belong to respectable and well-to-do families settled in different cities of Sindh but they were displaced in last year’s flood and were forced to shift to Karachi in search of food and shelter and education for their children.

They maintained that they were allotted 1,000 flats in Labour Square, Gulshan-e-Maymar, temporarily and their children were admitted to a school established by the authorities.

Impugning an advertisement issued by the Welfare Board and appearing in a local Sindhi daily on May 8, 2011, seeking applications from industrial labourers and workers for allotment of flats, they said their displacement would ruin the education of thousands of children of flood affectees.

They prayed to the court to direct the respondents including provincial ministry for labour and manpower not to remove them till alternate arrangements are made.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 16^th, 2011.