City development: PM’s task force chief performs I-11 groundbreaking

Lawyers and bureaucrats question task force role.

ISLAMABAD:

The newly established task force of the Prime Minister on Capital Development Authority (CDA) held the groundbreaking of Sector I-11 ‘in collaboration’ with the civic authority on Thursday.

The project will be completed in 18 months with a total cost of Rs186.928 million.

The project has 2,000 plots in total where 1,700 plots have been allotted to the CDA employees and 300 plots to the affectees, according to Member Engineering Syed Ibrar Hussain Shah.

The task force chairman Faisal Sakhi Butt performed the groundbreaking.

But people question how he can do it, considering it is interference in the authority’s affairs?

The three-member task force, headed by Butt, a local businessman, was constituted by the Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani last month.

The CDA Chairman Farkhand Iqbal agreed to it to the extent that he will not tolerate a parallel body. “I will never tolerate an authority within an authority like a state within a state”, he said but added that “there is no interference by the task force in the functions of the CDA”.

But the task force chairperson dispels this impression saying, “The task force will deliver in a year and a half what the bureaucracy could not in the last three and a half years,” said Butt, referring to the sluggish pace of development in the city.

He said that to overcome the shortage of housing units in the city, the task force is chalking out a strategy to open up new sectors and resume stalled development on others since 1990. CDA will soon hand over possession of plots to the allottees in stalled sectors like D-12, E-12, I-14 and I-15, he promised.

Lawyers and bureaucrats, however, feel that the task force is unlawfully taking over functions of the CDA, which is an autonomous body under the CDA Ordinance 1960. The task force is an overseeing body; it can not take over the functions of the CDA, said a legal expert.

“The task force has been created through an executive order issued by the Prime Minister only to monitor CDA’s working; it cannot take over its functions,” Justice (retired) Tariq Mahmood said. He added, “The concept of task forces suits dictators and such executive orders are always considered as interference.”

Other legal experts opined that the task force has “no legal standing and is working against the democratic norms”.

With input from APP

Published in The Express Tribune, January 6^th, 2012.