The sale of Sindh Provincial Cooperative Bank, a protected heritage building, was planned for Monday according to the sources in the authority.
Culture Secretary Abdul Aziz Uqaili wrote the authority on Monday, asking them to bring the matter to the advisory committee on heritage. “We have written them that since it is a protected heritage, the matter of the auction be brought before the committee,” the secretary informed The Express Tribune. According to him, the committee is vested with the authority to make this demand under the Sindh Heritage Act, 1994.
The heritage building was inaugurated in February 1935 by the then Governor of Bombay, Baron Brabourne. It was included in the list of 85 heritage sites in Hyderabad in 2008.
The housing authority is liquidating its properties and assets in Karachi, Hyderabad, Sanghar, Dadu, Thatta and Larkana districts. The auction of most of the items has been completed. The auction of SPCB’s Hyderabad building, built over 1,120 square yards, was slated for August 9 but it was delayed for official reasons. The bid was to start at Rs100 million.
The authority’s officials, however, now deny that any bidding activity was scheduled for Monday. “The media is spreading wrong information,” says Registrar Muhammad Sadiq Rajar, who is also the liquidator of the properties. But he could not explain the sudden intervention of the culture department.
The news about the sale of the heritage site elicited strong reaction with former bureaucrats and preservationists. Former secretaries of the culture department, Gul Muhammad Umrani and Shams Jaffrani, went public with their criticism.
“The decision has been shelved for now due to criticism in the media and reaction from the experts,” an officer told The Express Tribune.
Rajar said that though they had wanted to sell the heritage building it did not go ahead on the scheduled date. “We have to arrange money for the salaries, pensions and to pay for the unrecovered loans of over Rs560 million,” he told The Express Tribune. He said the auction will be readvertized if it were to happen again.
According to Uqaili, the building is a ‘protected heritage’ unless it is denotified by the heritage committee or its status is removed. “The law is clear,” he said. The committee is made up of the chief secretary of Sindh, the secretaries of culture, antiquities and works and services, the director-general of the Sindh Building Control Authority, urbanist Arif Hasan and Suhail Kalhoro.
The CEO of the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, Yasmeen Lari, said that after she heard news about the auction, she wrote to the Endowment Fund Trust (EFT) on Monday and requested that it be stopped. “It is clear that the walls are in a reasonable state of repair and so are the reinforced concrete beams…the biggest issues are the reinforced concrete slabs which are in a highly damaged state because of the constant ingress of rainwater,” she wrote, referring to pictures published in The Express Tribune on Monday.
Abdul Hamid Akhund, the secretary of EFT responded to her, saying that in September 2011, the organisation had proposed that the restoration of the building. At that time the chief minister had approved the transfer of the building to the antiquities department, but this has not been done.
“I think it is good that the auction has been stopped. The building must be put to good use so that it is maintained,” she to The Express Tribune via e-mail. She suggested that a survey report on the building and an assessment of the reinforced concrete elements be conducted so that methods to repair and conserve the building can be figured out.
“These things are essential before any conservation work can begin,” she said.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 28th, 2012.
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