Say a Prayer for Lahore

From The News, 13 November 2009 (http://www.thenews.com.pk/editorial_detail.asp?id=208278)


The only thing as incredulous as the recent announcement by the Government of Punjab -- it announced its intention to construct a highway through the heart of Lahore -- was the recent statement of the CEO of Fashion Pakistan Week that their glorified display of clothes was a "gesture of defiance towards the Taliban."

Our fashion industry is as much of an industry as the Holy Roman empire was holy, Roman or an empire. Our designers are talented without doubt; but to suggest that parading scantily clad men and women down a runway behind the bunkers and barricades of a five-star hotel in Karachi is an act of defiance is, well, really stretching the limits to which the "security situation" can make a fool out of us. The foreign media took to the sound bite like a starving man to a steak and now, once again, Pakistan is portrayed as two-dimensional: a country teeming with brave designers, fighting Islamic militancy. My friend and critic Faiza S.

Khan said it perfectly in her column at openthemagazine.com:

"One designer lamentably laid claim to being 'a very brave woman' for displaying her clothes on a catwalk at a five-star hotel in a country where women have been known to be murdered, maimed, mutilated and on occasion buried alive, where girls' schools are routinely attacked and where, even at the best of times, women's rights, outside of a tiny income bracket, are limited at best. Another designer called it an act of defiance in the face of the Taliban, glossing over the fact that fashion shows do, in fact, take place with some regularity in Pakistan, and if one must intellectualise this, then it could more honestly be described as a display of affluence in the face of a nation torn apart by the gaping chasm between rich and poor. Why the foreign media can't ask Pakistani designers questions about their work and why they, in turn, yield to the temptation, like Miss Universe, of providing a sound bite on world peace is beyond me."

Over the weekend, the Chief Minister of Punjab announced that he was allocating Rs3.15 billion for a project to widen Lahore's Canal Road.

The decision can only be described, at best, as a reckless adventure and, at worst, a catastrophe waiting to happen.

In 2006, the Traffic Engineering and Planning Agency (TEPA) of Lahore Development Agency (LDA) proposed to widen the Canal Bank Road, purportedly to reduce traffic congestion in the city. Because the project was over Rs50 million, the provisions of the Pakistan Environmental Protection Act,

1997 kicked in and TEPA was constrained to engage the National Engineering Services Pakistan (NESPAK) to carry out an environmental impact assessment (EIA) of the project. This was done and the EIA was presented to the Environment Protection Agency (EPA), Punjab, in a public hearing where hundreds of Lahoris gathered to protest against the decision to deprive the city of one of its last surviving environmental heritages: the 14 kilometres of green belt that line the canal and make the street one of the most unique avenues in the world.

The EPA, Punjab approved the EIA but before the project could go any further, the Lahore Bachao Tehreek (an umbrella organisation of dozens of grass-root NGOs as well as WWF-Pakistan) challenged the veracity of the EIA as well as the approval granted to it by the EPA, Punjab. The case remains pending before the Lahore High Court.

The announcement by the mhief minister, giving the go-ahead for the project "after completion of design", raises some important points.

First, it is clear that the project approved by the CM is not the project that the TEPA had originally proposed in 2006. For one thing, the cost of this new project is nearly five times the cost of the original design. Also, according to news reports, the new project is set to incorporate new features along the Canal Road (like "beautifications" which, I must hastily point out, in the context of roads means nothing).

What this means is that the Government of Punjab cannot use the EIA approval granted to the original TEPA project. According to our laws which, the last time I checked still apply to everyone including the government, road projects in excess of Rs50 million must have an EIA carried out and should be approved by the EPA.

But the observance of legal and procedural formalities is not the primary concern that most Lahoris have about the road widening project. It's an open secret that the Government of Punjab is operating on overdraft.

In such a situation, it would seem bizarre that the provincial government would choose to spend Rs3.15 billion -- nearly 10 per cent of the allocations it made last year to the three heads of health, public health and education -- on one road in one city of the province.

Less than 20 per cent of Lahoris have access to cars. For the vast majority of the over eight million people who try and live and work in this city, transport and mobility are dependent on motorcycles, cycles and what is euphemistically referred to as "public transport" (there are less than 1,000 buses that ply the city's streets). Ever since the previous tenure of Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif, when the Punjab Road Transport Corporation was shut down, neither this nor the PML-Q government of Chaudhary Pervaiz Elahi have spent a rupee on public transport, which, by the way, is the only way to reduce traffic congestion in a city. Now we are told that a seriously broke government is about to spend billions of rupees it doesn't have on a road it doesn't need for people who don't want or use it. Remarkable indeed.

In a presentation made by NESPAK on August 31 this year, the various options of widening the Canal Road were presented to the CM. According to NESPAK, all the road widening projects would "fail" by 2020 -- meaning thereby that if the government didn't do something to invest in public transport, and soon, the billion-rupee road widening adventure is, at best, a 10-year frolic. Is the Government of Punjab serious? Does the chief minister not know that, according to the Punjab Economic Survey of 2005 carried out by the Planning and Development Department (P&D), over 50 per cent of Punjabis live in slums? Who is this road being widened for?

All too often our politicians harbor the mistaken belief that infrastructure development is the only thing that will make our cities "modern"; that infrastructure is the only thing that will attract the foreign investment necessary to bring economic prosperity to a developing nation. But where are the examples of the success of this model? Our own urban Guru, Arif Hasan, in his brilliant essay "The world class city concept and its repercussion on urban planning in the Asia-Pacific region" demonstrates that our preoccupation with a modern city is also the root of our urban decay. But who in the government reads? Thus, one can only pray for Lahore.

Hubris of the Centaurus

In Greek mythology the centaurus were barbarous beasts said to be half-horse and half-human. One centaurus, Chiron, was extremely wise and is said to have tutored Hercules and Jason (of the Argonauts). According to legend, Hercules inflicted an accidental wound upon his mentor that left the beast living but in great pain. Chiron begged and pleaded for the gods to end his suffering until finally, taking pity, Zeus mercifully let the beast die and gave him a place in the stars. Indeed, Centaurus the Centaur is considered the most magnificent of the southern constellations.

More recently, the spectre of a new centaurus has raised itself in the heart of our capital. Located on the corner of Jinnah and Faisal Avenues (for those who live in Islambad, it’s the huge hole in the ground at the western end of Blue Area), this centaurus is in the form of a property development envisioning high-rise luxury apartments, a business center and a shopping mall as well as “7-star star hotel.” Spread over 6.59 acres of prime real estate, the land for The Centaurus project is said to be the most expensive ever purchased in the history of Pakistan. And somehow, a photo of this mythical beast even graces the front page of the Economic Survey 2006-2007 published by the Finance Division of the Government of Pakistan.

Citizens of Islamabad, already in a state of alarm over the never-ending development projects being simultaneously undertaken in the city, are right to be concerned about this new development project. Some, no doubt in the wake of tragic earthquake of October 2005, are worried about the structural safety of such a high-rise construction in an area classified as Earthquake Zone IV. Some are worried that the traffic generated by this project will choke the main traffic arteries and some of the secondary and tertiary roads. Still more are worried about the effect this project will have on Islamabad’s water table. Others are concerned that the city’s infrastructure will not be able to cope with the demands of such a development. Some nearby residents are even concerned about the knock-on effect such a project will have on their neighborhoods and their homes. Clearly, an urban development project of this scale has adverse environmental effects.

Yet the manner in which the developers of this project, the Pak-Gulf Construction (Pvt) Ltd (PGCL), has carried out its responsibility to comply with our environmental protection laws leaves much to be desired. As if that weren’t enough, the Environment Protection Agency’s handling of this matter – on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the passing of the Pakistan Environmental Act, 1997 – is a stark reminder of the dismal enforcement record of our frontline environment protector and regulator. It’s as if the PEPA mandatory procedures didn’t exist or, if it did, didn’t matter. All this points to a grave misunderstanding of the nature and purpose of such a law and the procedures it lays out for anything that may harm the environment.

Conscientious citizens, led by Qazi Isa Daudpota, Helga Ahmed and others, wrote to Mr. Asif Shuja Khan, the Director-General of the EPA, making him aware of the serious environmental concerns raised by such a development as well as the fact that construction of The Centaurus began without the submission of an EIA and before a public hearing could be held (both punishable violations of the mandatory provisions of PEPA). For its part, the environmental regulator responded by issuing toothless reminders to the PGCL to comply with the law. The developers, in turn, engaged the services of Hagler Bailly which churned out an EIA report giving the project the green light it had been paid to do.

Some of the EIA report’s contents are quite revealing. For instance, it records that the CDA, in its agreement with PGCL, “shall at its own cost be responsible for providing all basic services such as electricity, gas, water, sewerage, drainage at the site of the Plot no later than the approval or deemed approval of the Plans or the Revised or Revised Plans as the case may be.” Such a concession may be a measure of the investor-friendly stance our government, but isn’t expecting the people of Islamabad to subsidize the infrastructure for the development a tall order? – which is what will happen when the CDA offsets the cost of providing The Centaurus utility infrastructure against the revenues it receives in the forms of fees and taxes.

While the EIA report considers The Centaurus an environmentally friendly prospect (and no doubt the EPA will approve the project – Qazi Isa Daudpota et al will continue to give it the scrutiny it deserves), the disclosures it makes raise questions about the decision making process that led to such a project being allowed in Islamabad in the first place. Indeed, there’s much to question about a mind that thinks a “7-star hotel” (whatever that is?) is a viable business proposition in a city which has seen a military operation and two bomb blasts in the last two months alone. Obviously, these minds are not familiar with the Ryugyong hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea.

Some say it was with stars in their eyes (other suspect it was one of those Cold-War type reactions to news that a South Korean firm had just constructed the Westin Stamford Hotel in Singapore) that the North Korean Government decided to build the world’s largest and tallest hotel. Construction began in 1987 at an estimated cost of $750 million, or 2% of the country’s GDP (for comparison, 2% of the US GDP would be about $220 billion). Indeed, the Ryugyong hotel undertaking was a massive undertaking for such a poor country.

When the basic cement structure was erected, the building measured in at nearly 1,110 feet and boasted 3.9 million square feet of floor space. The scale of the North Korean government’s mistaken belief in its ability to fill it can be estimated by the fact that, while the hotel was built with more than 3,000 rooms, at the time it was constructed only several hundred tourists visited the country. Yet so great was their belief in the hotel that – just as the cover of the last Economic Survey published by the Government of Pakistan carried an artist’s rendition of The Centaurus – it issued postage stamps with the hotel printed on them before the structure was complete.

Tragically, construction was halted in 1992. The North Korean Government (with stars in its eyes) just ran out of money. The structure has never been certified safe for habitation and not even the windows have been installed. Attempts to draw investment to complete the project have not worked either (the North Korean government even announced it would allow developers to use the building as “casinos, nightclubs or Japanese lounges . . .” if they agreed to complete it. To no avail: the skeleton of the structure casts its shadow over all of Pyongyang. It can literally be seen from every corner of the city and is a constant decaying reminder to the hubris that built it. Even the postage stamps have been declared invalid.

The Centaurus project also bristles with a contagious hubris of its own. Perhaps it will cloud the view from the site to the slums off F-7. So far, it has managed to convince the powers that be that it is a step in some imaginary right direction. One can only pray that this centaurus becomes all it promises to be, for if it isn’t, it will sit there, fouling the skyline of Islamabad and waiting for a Zeus to put it out of its misery.