Green belts: Concrete jungle eating away at greenery

Weak enforcement by CDA, unchecked development, encroachments among causes.

ISLAMABAD: Back in the 70s, when Islamabad was still in its infancy, Fauzia Minallah remembers that the Capital Development Authority (CDA) was a strict and efficient organisation.

“Back then, if residents cut down trees from in front of their houses, CDA enforcement staff would soon turn up at their doorsteps and hold them accountable,” said Minallah, an activist, who has been a resident of Islamabad for over forty years and has also penned a book about the capital’s cultural and natural heritage.



The connection with nature Islamabad provided to Minallah during her childhood is fast withering away.

Over the years, the city’s green belts have been encroached upon with impunity by public and private organisations. Commercial enterprises have cropped up in residential areas, while kiosks and parking lots have replaced trees in open spaces. Meanwhile, the CDA — now an inept civic agency — has mostly turned a blind eye to these violations, due in no small part to political influence and pressure from powerful lobbies.

The lack of will on the part of the civic agency becomes evident when CDA officials hang their heads and blame external influences for illegal land use.

“Enforcement is weak but there is also an element of social responsibility here,” a senior CDA Environment wing official told The Express Tribune. “What do you expect when even the educated people do not respect rules and regulations?”

True enough, mobile phone service providers, business owners, private hospitals, five-star hotels, fast food outlets and even newspaper offices have encroached on public land — including green belts — for their private parking lots. “People who work in these organisations and those who visit them are mostly educated, white-collar citizens,” the CDA official said.



Minallah agreed that there are people in Islamabad who would rather go look at shopping malls than appreciate natural beauty. But she also said strict implementation and proper planning cannot be blamed solely on citizens’ actions.

“If there is no parking space in the city, it is a planning problem,” Minallah said. “Laws to establish parking lots in the basements of commercial buildings should be implemented.”

Khalil Sufi, a member of a citizens’ group called Islamabad Citizens Committee, said parking plazas should be built in the capital and parking fees should be administered. He said that in most international cities, there are heavy fees for parking cars and strict fines if people do not follow parking rules.

Sufi said that green belts and encroachment issues cannot be resolved until the CDA takes action against the commercial use of residential areas. According to CDA bylaws, running a commercial business in a residential sector is illegal, but the agency has failed to meaningfully crackdown on violators. The most glaring examples are for-profit private schools, which CDA officials routinely claim are allowed to break the law as they provide a “public service”.

Sufi suggested that the CDA involve homeowners and students on a volunteer basis to identify violations of land use if it lacks staff in its enforcement department.

“We leave everything on the government, but citizens have to build pressure as well,” Sufi said. “We should stop patronising commercial outlets that operate in residential areas.”

Published in The Express Tribune, July 1^st, 2013.