After CDA’s snub: Slum dwellers threaten another protest for right to shelter

CDA chief cancelled meeting with AWP and katchi abadi alliance members.

ISLAMABAD:

Residents of capital's katchi abadis on Tuesday threatened to launch a fresh protest against the indifference of city managers towards their miseries.

The move was announced after Capital Development Authority (CDA) chief Nadeem Hassan Asif refused to meet representatives of the All-Pakistan Alliance for Katchi Abadis and Awami Workers Party (AWP) at the CDA headquarters on Tuesday.



A delegation of the alliance had been scheduled to meet with the CDA chairman on Tuesday morning but his staff informed the delegation that he could not meet them due to 'unavoidable circumstances'.

The alliance's chairperson and AWP Secretary General Aasim Sajjad Akhtar said katchi abadi residents are treated like second-class citizens by the bureaucracy as the latter holds itself answerable only to the rich and powerful. This attitude has persisted for several years even though the CDA was forced to create a katchi abadi cell to acknowledge the existence and rights of katchi abadi dwellers in 1995, he added.

Akhtar pointed out that the alliance had been trying to hold a meeting with the CDA chairman since the latter took office around three months ago but the authority's chief had not shown any willingness to engage with the city's non-registered residents. AWP members said the anti-poor attitude was evident from the blanket terms used for katchi abadis' residents, labelling them as 'terrorists' and 'criminals'.



They said katchi abadis house the vast majority of the capital's working class and if thousands of these workers boycotted their duties for a day, the entire bureaucracy would fail to keep the city functioning.

The alliance and AWP also condemned the attitude of mainstream political parties which have begun making an ingress in various katchi abadis in light of the upcoming local government elections but take no interest in addressing long-standing issues of permanent shelter and provision of public utilities.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 23^rd, 2013.