Light at the end of the (Margalla) tunnel

The Margalla Tunnel would have been a direct attack on right of the citizens of Islamabad to the pursuit of happiness.

“Thou Shalt Not”! The chief justice of Pakistan told the representatives of the government, giving his verdict against constructing a tunnel through the protected Margalla Hills. To all of us standing in front of a three-member bench in court number one of the Supreme Court, the verdict sounded like one of the Ten Commandments. The struggle of the vibrant civil society, led by the Margalla Hills Society, the League of Architects, Senator Mushahid Hussain, Youlin and Archi Nama magazines succeeded in saving Islamabad and the Margalla Hills from the developer hyenas.

It all started when Prime Minsiter Nawaz Sharif, on August 23, announced his government’s plan for an ambitious $12 billion twin city project which envisaged building a new Islamabad behind the Margalla hills on 2,500 acres of land. The ‘new’ Islamabad was to be connected with Islamabad via a road tunnel through the Margalla Hills, a national park protected under the Islamabad Wildlife Ordinance, 1979.

The planning of Islamabad is taught all over the world in city and regional planning departments as a model case of a successfully planned city. The famous Greek town planner, Constantinos Doxiadis, who designed the Master Plan of Islamabad, strategically placed the new city at the foothills of the Margallas, with the hills acting as a barrier in the north. He envisaged the growth of urban Islamabad westwards towards, and across, the GT road. Rural Islamabad was planned to extend southwards all the way up to the GT road. There was no provision to build a new city behind the Margallas as ICT has ample land between the Islamabad highway and the Murree hills for any future development.

In the master plan zoning, the residential zones of Islamabad, the ‘E’, ‘F’ and ‘G’ sectors are located between the Margalla Hills and Kashmir Highway, away from the noise and traffic pollution, to maintain the privacy that residential neighbourhoods need. The public zones of the educational sector ‘H’, and the industrial sector ‘I’, are sandwiched between the busy Kashmir Highway and IJP roads, for easy access of trucks and trailers. This zoning of the city has been very successful till today, except for the I-8 sector which was developed in contravention of the master plan. A tunnel through the Margalla Hills would have emerged in the heart of the residential sectors of Islamabad invading the residential privacy, polluting the clean air and jeopardising the security of the citizens of the capital city.

The supporters of the proposed Margalla Tunnel compared it with the Kohat Tunnel; however, there are three important reasons why the Kohat Tunnel was a necessity: 1) It is on the Indus Highway which is the most important trade route of Pakistan, connecting Karachi to the GT Road and the motorway network; 2) The Kohat Tunnel is through the Khigana Mountains, a continuous mountain range that cannot be bypassed; 3) The original route of the Indus Highway was through Kotal pass, which is too steep and narrow for large vehicles to use. The proposed Margalla Tunnel, on the other hand, was not on any trade route and there is a comfortable route around the Margalla Hills (Khanpur Road-GT Road-Kashmir Highway) that has been used since Islamabad was built.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in the US Declaration of Independence in 1776, that all citizens were endowed with unalienable rights including the ‘pursuit of happiness’. The Margalla Tunnel would have been a direct attack on the right of the citizens of Islamabad to the pursuit of happiness.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 29^th, 2013.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.