Housing difficulties

Officials from the Housing and Works Ministry told a Senate Standing Committee last Thursday that 200 flats had been approved for allotment to government employees whose requests had been sitting on a waiting list.
Considering that as per the ministry claims the list contains as many as 17,000 requests - according to a Recorder Report, as of January 2007 the figure stood at a staggering 25,000 - the new allotments are not going to resolve the problem to anywhere near satisfactory level.
Ministry officials say that there are only 18,500 government accommodations in Islamabad. All these figures are as confusing as they are misleading. The picture looks more complicated with the surfacing of the issue of allotments to employees of non-entitled departments, that the ministry secretary told the Senate committee, have been cancelled in pursuance of the directive of Prime Minister's Inspection Commission.
Then there is the fact, which came to light at the same committee meeting, that many of the police officials had occupied more than one house/flat, renting them out to outsiders.
To add insult to injury, the officials representing the police department demanded authentication of the forcibly occupied accommodation. Like so much that is going on in other fields in this country, law of the jungle rules the housing sector, too. Those having the right kind of connections or power can have whatever they fancy, while the weak but playing-by-the-rules type suffer in a long, long waiting line.
So far as the advocates of post-facto regularisation are concerned, it is good to note that the Senate Committee has told them off, averring that this would create a bad precedent. It further ruled that such allotments should be considered outside the law and unfair to those on the waiting list.
One can only hope the Estate Office, the body responsible for taking care of the housing needs of government employees - and largely to blame for out-of-turn as well as non-entitled allotments - will implement the Senate Committee's directive without any further loss of time. That, of course, is not going to bring respite to all, what it might do is to create a much-needed sense of fairness.
It is plain that the government needs to devise a new longer term plan to overcome the housing problem for its employees who have neither the choice not to serve in the capital nor the means to afford expensive housing out of their own pockets. Notably, the housing secretary mentioned that the Nawaz Sharif government had decided to construct 500,000 low cost housing units, but the scheme has since been aborted.
It is unclear what the reason was behind the change. But given the track record of successive governments cancelling or cutting down on some of the projects initiated by their predecessors, this one too could be a case of plain contempt for something started by a disliked predecessor.
Whatever may be the reason, the important thing is to address the issue at hand on a long-term basis. The present caretaker set-up hardly is in position to do the needful. The issue has to wait until the upcoming general elections usher in a new, elected government. The wait should not be so difficult to endure by people who are already standing in a queue that is 17,000 - if not 25,000 - requests long.