Roti, kapra aur dukaan: Govt schemes to give builders katchi abadi land

Devastating new law empowers private association of developers

KARACHI:

The poor of Karachi’s katchi abadis are more wretched than the prostitutes in Ghulam Abbas’s 1940 short story Anandi.

In the story, a city decides to throw out its prostitutes and take over their houses in the red light area because everyone thought their presence was corrupting society. The women are relocated to an abandoned spot outside the city. But when the women build new lives there, an entire city springs up around it. Twenty years down the line, this new city, Anandi, decides it has to demolish the red light area downtown because it is corrupting society. The city council throws the women out to an abandoned spot outside the city. History repeats itself.

Expansion 2014, a digital print by Taqi Shaheen. PHOTO: COURTESY THE ARTIST

As an Urdu short story writer Ghulam Abbas was no urban planner but Anandi seems to have eerily foretold something we are seeing in Karachi today: the desire to get rid of settlements that are deemed unsightly, unwanted and a source of iniquity. In this case it is called the Sindh Special Development Board Bill, 2014.

The new law says: All katchi abadis and slums will be rehabilitated. Each household will be given an alternative space to live in, 600 square feet (one bedroom and lounge) “preferably” (but not necessarily) in the same area. Meanwhile, the builder will construct free units for them on the land they have vacated and which is going to be bulldozed. In return, the builder gets 25% of the katchi abadi land for free where he can build a commercial project to sell. The Special Development board can pick a member of ABAD to do the work. ABAD is a private association of builders and developers in Pakistan. Its 660 members include the likes of Bahria Town Pvt. Ltd, Saima Real Estate, Chapal Builders.

This all may sound very noble but why has the government decided to pursue this new law? This has not made sense to Tasneem Siddiqui, an expert on low-income housing for Hyderabad’s Khuda ki Basti scheme that won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1995. “I don’t understand the rationale or justification,” he tells The Express Tribune. We already have laws and institutions that do low-income housing. If they weren’t doing it, then either those laws needed changes or the institutions needed hauling up.

Is the Sindh Katchi Abadi Authority (SKAA) with its Act of 1987 deficient? It did at least four sasti bastis, to name a few. The Malir Development Authority balloted hundreds of thousands of plots during Pervez Musharraf’s tenure. What about the Sindh Gothabad (Housing Scheme) Act, 1987 under which Karachi’s 2,173 settlements have been documented (by the Orangi Pilot Project)? Did it fall short somewhere? And what about the Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Housing Cell? When the Pakistan Peoples Party came to power in 2008, Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah formed the cell and said it would give shelter to the poor in all district headquarters. Since then it has helped people build 6,000 units and has entered a second phase of building 6,000 more. “It is at the chief minister’s discretion,” said an officer at the cell. So, technically, if he wanted to put more money into it he could. So why is the CM heading this new board?



Barely any debate has taken place on why this board is needed given the institutions that already exist. On October 24, the bill was passed with the opposition protesting that they had not been given a draft. It effectively created an entirely new government body in the shape of the Sindh Special Development Board. But, “[p]lanning is not something boards can do,” points out Karachi’s most eminent historian, planner and architect Arif Hasan. That is the job of a master plan department as it is the overarching city planning agency. Technically, the master plan department sits on top of the Sindh Building Control Authority (SBCA) and decides these policies. The only problem is that last year, the SBCA was given control of the Master Plan department. This has been challenged in court, possibly affecting how the Sindh government can empower the SBCA on this new board. It is in light of this that Prof. Noman Ahmed of NED University says: “I do not think that the insertion of [the SBCA] in its proposed role as per proviso of this [new] law shall hold good legally and administratively.”

These legal nuances aside, Prof. Noman also sees this law as the outcome of an ongoing rift between the two major parties in the Sindh Assembly. By pushing it through, the government has taken more power away from local government. “Many functions and operational privileges that have been lawfully enjoyed by the local bodies, are now vested in a provincially constituted institutional arrangement,” he says. The Sindh Solid Waste Management Board Bill, passed some months ago, is also a case in point. It sets up a centralized provincial authority to run solid waste management in major urban centres while taking these powers back from the municipal bodies. In the Sindh Special Development Board’s case the government seems to be saying forget the Karachi Municipal Corporation, the Sindh government wants a new board to do this work.

Only, that instead of the Sindh government acting as a watchdog for builders and developers, it is handing them half of the city. “With investment money banging on the door, no self-serving government would care to create hurdles for it by establishing building bye-laws and master plans,” explains architect Arif Belgaumi, who teaches architectural design at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. “This is a classic trinity of free market economics, privatization, deregulation and cuts to social spending. The State only acts as a facilitating agent.”

The irony is that this piece was legislation was put forward by the left-leaning Pakistan Peoples Party, which was supposed to be a pro-poor party. This is a shame because it was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s who changed government policy on katchi abadis by saying they should be regularized and its people be given a right to the land at affordable prices. He was responsible for an improvement in institutional thinking that just considered the dwellers of katchi abadis a nuisance.

One of the clearest indications that this is not a pro-poor piece of legislation is the simple fact that no one representing the poor is on the board that decides the fate of katchi abadis, slums and goths. It is full of government functionaries and members of statutory bodies. But to give the impression that it has the welfare of the people of the katchi abadis at heart, the bill says that the builder will provide them health insurance and education up to graduation. (One developer is already making these charitable promises on television).

Arif Belgaumi sees this as an absence of governance. “Over the years ... so much of the State's responsibility—utilities, housing, education, health, security—has been assumed by the private sector and NGOs that the State has given up the pretense of providing them.”

So the developers are in fact, the de facto government of Karachi. This is a neoliberal shift, in a way, that it gives the private sector more of a role. But the private sector makes decisions based on commercial interests and not necessarily for the welfare of the citizen no matter how rich or poor they are—as the state should be doing. In this case, the private sector is making a push to get a valuable asset: land.

Arif Hasan has seen this kind of neoliberal thinking inform decision-making for the Karachi Development Authority and politicians. “You have people, developers, officials saying that these people are sitting on extremely valuable land,” he says. And people like Khuda ki Basti’s Tasneem Siddiqui and the late Parween Rahman of the Orangi Pilot Project have been accused of encouraging katchi abadis by advocating regularisation (giving people lease papers).

Just as with the red light area in Anandi, people in Karachi blame social ills on katchi abadis because they are home to the poor. People say that they shouldn’t exist. “This is middle-class thinking,” says Siddiqui. Poor people are criminals. ABAD’s chief Junaid Taloo demonstrates this philosophy amply by saying: “There is major crime there because the law enforcers can’t enter.” He adds that ABAD wants to help address Karachi’s law and order problem by rehabilitating slums.

And so slums should be demolished. It was this policy outlook that prompted the government to start the Lines Area Redevelopment Project in the early 1980s. The residents were relocated to places like Korangi. They were given parchis for their housing units with the promise that they would be called back when the new housing was built. Frustrated by delays many people eventually sold their parchis to middlemen or developers. The sunk further into poverty. In the meantime, the land was encroached on by commercial interests and even the police. “So it’s a garbage dump, that scheme,” argues Siddiqui. “That’s why I am against removing people.” But what about giving them cash for their land? The problem is that they will still then be shelterless. You have to regularise them where they live.

This is a model that works. Tasneem Siddiqui suggests first holding a survey. Check how the land is being used, how many people live in one unit and what it consists of (ground +1 or +2). You tell people what the cost of the land is and how much they have to pay for it to become an owner. In the case of katchi abadis the law says they needed to pay Rs25,000 in 1987. (This rate may have been revised upwards). There is a law that for incremental housing that says government land can be sold for 25% of the market price. This is how you make it affordable for low-income groups.

Siddiqui recommends dividing that payment into three parts. One-third goes to the government to pay for the subsidized land so the katchi abadi dweller gets a lease. One-third goes into paying for an office to do all this paperwork. And one-third goes into improving the katchi abadi’s services such as sanitation. In this model no one is uprooted and the living conditions in the katchi abadi are gradually improved. The government also brings into its net the katchi abadi.

Siddiqui argues that this was an affordable model whose success the Sindh Katchi Abadi Authority demonstrated from 1991 to 2005. It gave papers to many katchi abadis. “For 15 years this work went on and was internationally recognised. It was self-financed,” he says. “There was no ADB or World Bank or even the Government of Sindh.”

Upgrading an informal settlement is one of the solutions. But ABAD’s Junaid Taloo and the people behind this law seem to think the ‘demolish and build high-rise’ model is a better fix. Arif Hasan worked on evaluating the possibility of this model in Ho Chi Minh city. They found that the governments can’t afford it and neither could the people. Shifting slum dwellers out to rebuild cost $5,500 per unit but upgrading slums cost the more reasonable $325 per unit.

Bombay was not successful in trying the ‘demolish and rebuild’ model in its biggest slum, Dharavi. The Maharashtra government had to give in to the National Slum Dwellers Association protests. In Turkey, though, the government body TOKİ was able to push this experiment through. It demolished the slums where land was valuable and relocated people to 15-story flats on the outskirts. But in the end Turkey was accused of human rights violations. “They are nicely designed blocks, with all the facilities you can think of, but the people are angry,” says Hasan. They can’t supervise their children so they form gangs and they take drugs. Schools and hospitals are too far away. Women can’t get work near their residence where they used to before.

Any policy for a katchi abadi needs to consider the cultural, social and economic fabric of that neighbourhood. One major reality to factor in is that working class people need to live close to their work—especially if the city doesn’t have a mass transit system. Architect Adnan Asdar, who has designed low-income housing, saw what happened to people who were evicted to make way for the Lyari Expressway. They were sent to Musharraf Colony near Hawkesbay. “It is two hours away from the city centre,” he says. People spend Rs100 a day on transport to work which comes to Rs3,000 a month. “People shouldn’t have to pay more than 5% of their income on transport,” he says. You make them poorer by relocating them.

Economics also comes into play if you consider the model of moving people in katchi abadis into high-rise buildings. A walk through any of these neighbourhoods will prove that they use their plots for small business as well. What will a mechanic do if you put him on the sixth floor?

And unless the new low-cost flats you build for katchi abadi dwellers are handed over free, you will make them poorer if you expect them to pay for them. “This happened with the Landhi-Korangi, General Azam scheme, based on the Doxiadis plan in the 1960s,” says Arif Hasan. He is referring to 1958 when Ayub Khan decided to create enclaves for the working poor to relieve the pressure on the centre of Karachi. These people were mostly refugees from India. Lt. Gen. Azam Khan was the minister for rehabilitation at the time. The regime enlisted the help of Greek architect CA Doxiadis who proposed to send them to Korangi. The people were supposed to pay monthly installments on the new housing but when they didn’t the project came to a standstill “because the revolving fund didn’t revolve”. A time came when the project was spending more on paying the staff meant to recover the dues than the dues themselves.

If the Sindh government doesn’t want more slums to develop they would do good to first study how they develop in the first place. There is no shortage of expert studies on this topic. Most of this history is linked to the influx of people for various reasons over the decades.

Originally though, according to Roland DeSouza of the non-profit Shehri, aside from Mithadar and Kharadar, all the rest of the areas in Karachi, such as the quarters, were planned by and large by the British. It was on the empty spaces that the newly arrived Muslims from India started to take up. They ‘squatted’ on nullahs, parks, amenity plots and plots vacated by the Hindus before the evacuee trust could get to them. Subsequently, though, a low-income housing backlog started to develop over the decades. “That is why katchi abadis developed, because they were affordable,” says Arif Hasan. “No poor person would live in a katchi abadi if they could afford a plot in a pukki abadi. The real KDA in Karachi were the informal developers [who made this possible].”

When the government did build low-cost housing, though, it sometimes didn’t factor in that the poor simply can’t wait. The Khuda ki Basti model works because it allows the poor to live close to the site and hands over the house in three months. “When KDA developed schemes for 60 sq yd plots they’d take the money and not develop it for another 10 years,” says DeSouza. “The builders don’t like the KKB model because there is no money to be made.”

There was more money in developing middle-income housing. Today there is no shortage of two-room flats that the builders make for Rs1.2 million on 600 square feet, says Tasneem Siddiqui. “There is a glut of them,” he says, pegging an estimated 50,000 of them empty in Karachi. “Ask ABAD why they are empty.”
They are empty because many times builders fail to fulfill promises to the client who has been keeping his end of the bargain by paying monthly installments. “They announce flats with no utility connections,” says Siddiqui. The builders delay the projects, escalate the price and blame government agencies for a lack of infrastructure—all of which they should have planned for in the first place. Sometimes the partners on the project fall out and the work is left incomplete. Sometimes the land is disputed in court.
People who make, say Rs10,000 a month can't afford to make down payments for a Rs1.2 million flat. They need low-income housing which has a different financial model. The government takes a reasonable price for the land. It was fixed at Rs25,000 per acre in 1987 but would have been revised since. In the end, the poor would pay Rs8,000 in total (if you took Rs100 per square yard) for an 80 square yard plot.

But then your government should want to make its land available. Siddiqui estimates that there could be up to 10,000 acres that could be freed up. His logic is unassailable: 20,000 people live in Khuda ki Basti; people who would have otherwise been in a slum. “Why can’t you make 10 such schemes?”

He suspects that ABAD’s members feel that now that government planned flat sites have dried up and they have to buy the land at expensive market rates, they have turned their sights to katchi abadies. “Now all the schemes are full by allotment and they want more plots,” he explains. In fact, Belgaumi questions why the bill has specifically restricted its beneficiaries to the membership of ABAD. “One could argue that the bill creates a monopolistic, unfair commercial relationship, in violation of the rules of the Sindh Public Procurement Authority by creating a law which awards work on the basis of a membership to a trade organisation.”

Arif Hasan foresees that builders will try to cross-subsidise if they attempt this model. It means that they will take over a katchi abadi, build expensive apartments by the street and use them to pay for the low-income ones behind. He is still scratching his head over the math, though. “At best they will do one settlement,” he says. It costs roughly Rs500,000 today to make one unit. He doesn’t see how it can be paid back even if you phase it out for 10 years. “This will not work, in my opinion. Not because these are wrong or institutional arrangements or objectives,” says Arif Hasan. “It will not work simply because the people involved do not have the capacity, technical or financial to uproot the settlements and replace them by high-rise buildings for the poor.” If you demolish homes that have utility connections, businesses, factories in them, then you’re going to have an explosion you aren’t going to be able to manage.

The truth is that this bill is linked to a grander plan.

When he first read the bill, Roland DeSouza realised that it answered a question he had when the Sindh High Density Development Board Bill came out in 2010. In it the government earmarked 11 neighbourhoods as high-density zones. “Most of them were katchi abadies,” he says. “At the time we wondered, how they were going to put high density zones in katchi abadis?” With this new law, it suddenly became crystal clear. The 2014 bill was making the 2010 bill possible.

Even Belgaumi sees the two bills as inter-related. “I will not be surprised if at some point in the near future the stipulations of the two bills are merged into one,” he says. Here is how it will work: The Sindh High Density Development Board act established a body which was willing to sell off the city for the right price. The Sindh Special Development Board act simply identifies the buyer in this transaction as ABAD. “In both bills the areas of the city to be transacted are the katchi abadis.” He says it is simply

masquerading as the magic bullet - public-private partnership - which will solve the acute housing shortage in the city. “But it is a pretext to open up large tracts of inner city land to the whims of unscrupulous real estate developers.”

No matter what the model, the experts are skeptical anything will be achieved simply because of the political fallout. ABAD’s Junaid Taloo insisted, however, that they will construct one example in a bid to win other people over. People like Arif Hasan have heard those kinds of promises before though. People who have lease papers won’t move easily. That is why the bill says the law enforcers will help. “They will send their goons in there,” says DeSouza. Belgaumi also saw the element of force by the need to include article 8.(13) "The law enforcement agencies shall provide maximum support to the board for removal of katchi abadies, slum structures and encroachments. The developer shall also be provided protection and a safe working environment to carry out their business activities."

Regularized katchi abadis are legally as good as the planned and leased neighbourhoods. Prof. Noman Ahmed feels that the underlying objective of this law seems to accord unjust powers to decide, plan, and execute on the land that they neither own nor possess the jurisdiction to operate upon. No one has even asked the poor if they want to live in a 600 sq feet space in a high-rise. And the people who live in joint family systems by adding a floor to their house are unlikely to be able to afford or want to live in a small flat.

Just to be clear. These urban planners are not against densification. Tasneem Siddiqui and Arif Hasan both back vertical growth. “I feel there is a great need for the densification of the more elite areas of the city,” says Hasan. “Karachi’s low-income settlement densities can go up to 6,000 persons plus per hectare but DHA is 200.” The high densities are creating conditions of overcrowding and the expansion of high-income settlements is also unsustainable.
Siddiqui espouses the low-rise high density formula in the heart of Karachi. He gives the example of Martin Quarters near Guru Mandir where houses are mostly ground floor only. “If you replanned, you could add 10,000 families actually,” he argues. All you need to do is add one more floor and a staircase. In places such as the military barracks opposite Lines Area he proposes going ground plus 4 for flats.

Ultimately, though, if the government really wants to tackle the housing crisis, it will have to raise densities to 850 persons per hectare whether high or low income. This means you can’t make a plot of over 400 square yards. This means you stop allowing 2,000 square yard mansions where only five people live as you see in DHA.

A shorter version of this story was published in The Express Tribune, November 10^th, 2014.