Zulfikarabad City will take 15 years to complete, officials tell Zardari

President gives ZDA one month to make the master plan.

KARACHI: In a move that might draw further ire from Sindhi nationalists, the Pakistan Peoples Party-led government has apparently decided to hit the full throttle button on the Zulfikarabad city project. During a meeting at Bilawal House on Wednesday, President Asif Ali Zardari directed officials to complete the master plan of the project within one month.

Zulfikarabad Development Authority (ZDA) officials briefed the president about the work on the six-kilometre Dhandhari Bridge that is being built on River Indus. The bridge will connect Keti Bunder with Shah Bunder.

Officials discussed problems like the environmental damage and displacement of residents if the project went ahead. Of particular concern is the land that needs to be reclaimed from sea and the damage to mangroves, which currently cover around 135,000 acres of land.

The Zulfikarabad project will be spread over 1.32 million acres of land across four talukas of Thatta district, Jati, Shah Bunder, Keti Bunder and Kharo Chhan. Authorities plan to reclaim 0.967 million acres of land from the sea. Ownership of the remaining 0.308 million acres is the main contention between residents of the area and the government.

Organisational hiccups

The Sindh Land Management and Development Company has been tasked with acquiring the necessary land for the project along with revenue department officials.

Officials told The Express Tribune that they could not design a master plan for such a project in one month. We are going to focus on reclaiming nearly 0.5 million acres of land below sea-level near Shah Bunder, said Amir Sangi, director operations of the Zulfikarabad project.

While talking about reclaiming land from the sea, Sangi said that dykes measuring 100 feet by 60 feet would be constructed to pump out the water. Shaukat Alvi, who has been associated with project since the beginning, said that Zulfikarabad could be modelled after the Chinese port city of Shenzhen. The project will be completed in fifteen years, said Alvi.

Threat to mangroves

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), nearly 135,000 acres of the proposed site is covered with mangroves. IUCN’s Tahir Qureshi said that the project has been proposed where nearly 70 per cent of the mangroves in Sindh lie.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 1^st, 2012.