Courts accommodated at Secretariat’s expense

Provincial govt decides to move offices of 5 depts to make room for the establishment of more civil courts.

LAHORE: The provincial government has decided to move the offices of five departments and a wing, housed in the Lahore Development Authority (LDA) Complex adjacent to the Punjab Civil Secretariat (PCS), to make room for the establishment of more civil courts.

Already burdened with a large number of people visiting the area, the housing of the lower courts in the LDA building will likely expose the portion of the Lower Mall to greater congestion, traffic and parking problems.

Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif had directed the chief secretary, Nasir Mehmood Khosa, in the first week of September, to vacate the building and hand it over to the Lahore High Court (LHC) for the establishment of 54 civil courts.

A Services and General Administration Department (S&GAD) official said that the chief minister went ahead with the decision in spite of strong opposition from the chief secretary.

According to the CM’s directive, he said, the LDA has dissolved its rental contract the S&GAD and signed a new agreement with the LHC and handed over three flours of the building.

The provincial government departments that will need relocation include:

Zakat and Ushr, Inter Provincial Coordination, Information Culture and Youth Affairs and Human Rights and Minority Affairs’, 15 offices of the Finance Department and 10 offices of the S&GAD’s Regulation Wing.

The government, the official said, had not so far selected an alternative location for the affected departments. He added that there was no suitable building in the vicinity of Civil Secretariat to which the departments could be shifted.

He said that Rs4 million had been spent to renovate the LDA Complex for housing the departments. “If the government now relocates them to a far off place,” he said, “it will defeat the purpose of the austerity drive under which the departments were originally moved to the LDA Complex from rented facilities.”

Besides, he said, establishing courts in the LDA Complex will add a security hazard to the Civil Secretariat.

The official said that the lower judiciary could instead have been housed closer to the judicial complex.

The S&GAD official said that the high rents the government will have to pay to accommodate the affected departments will become an additional burden on the public exchequer, already pressed for funds.

The displaced departments were moved to the LDA Complex, acquired on a nominal rent, in 2009 under an austerity drive. The drive was launched to free up resources by cutting public-sector expenditure.

These departments were earlier located in private buildings across the city.

The relocation helped the government save the amount it paid in rents. Besides, their new location adjacent to the Civil Secretariat helped the various departments coordinate more effectively.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 1^st, 2010.