With 25,000 government employees (January 2007 figure) waiting for residential accommodation, it is hardly good news, as given out by officials of Housing and Works Ministry in the Senate Standing Committee meeting on Thursday, that the Prime Minister has been pleased to approve 200 flats in the G-6 sector for allotment to government servants on the waiting list.
The Estate Office of the government, that is responsible for providing accommodation to government servants, coming from all the four corners of the country for duty at Islamabad, takes on years sitting over requests for a house where government officials could live with their family.
The Estate Office is notorious in sitting over them for many years before they could be persuaded to allot an accommodation. We know a lower grade official, who filed his request in 1972, was provided a flat in 2004, 32 years later, and during this time he had to keep his wife and children in his village.
Often the Estate Office resorts to out of turn allotments. Sometimes it is closed but the practice was resumed recently at the behest of the former prime minister Shaukat Aziz, who had a field day in allotting vacant houses to many of his favourite officers.
There are only 18,500 government accommodation at Islamabad, according to Housing and Works Secretary Abdur Rauf Chaudhry, who kindly provided the information to this scribe on Thursday evening. By the way the secretary made a correction that there were only 17,000 people on the accommodation waiting list and not 25,000. The last stated figure of 25,000 appeared in a news report published in January this year.
From the correction, it should become evident - and this would be good news - that nearly 8,000 officials received government accommodation within the past 11 months. It came to light in Thursday's Senate Standing Committee that a number of officials of the police department had forcibly occupied Estate Office residential accommodation.
It also came to light in the same meeting that many of the police officials had occupied more than one houses or flats, and in many cases they had rented them out to outsiders. Police officials present at the meeting pleaded that the allotment of these forcibly occupied houses and flats be 'regularised'.
However, the committee reacted, and said 'it would create a paid precedent' and ex post facto allotment should be outside the law and unfair to persons on the waiting list. At the same time, the committee recommended that the Estate Office should adopt a long-term policy to solve the shortage of residential houses faced by federal government employees, taking into consideration the exorbitant cost of land and ever increasing cost of construction.
Secretary, housing ministry, informed the committee that all previous allotments to employees of non-entitled departments have been cancelled in pursuance of Prime Minister's Inspection Commission's directive.
That notwithstanding the Senate Committee commiserated with the lot of the police officials and directed the housing ministry to create a residential colony, especially reserved for personnel of police department who had been posted for duty at the Islamabad Capital Territory.
'The ministry should act in time on this direction and it should write a new PC-I proposal about the residential colony and submit the proposal for government approval within a week. Meanwhile the housing ministry was asked to have the houses illegally occupied by these police personnel by March 1, next year.
This was one case among many out of turn allotment, though it also came to transpire in the meeting that 58 personnel, not belonging to the Estate Office Pool, were allotted government accommodation and they had been served with notices to vacate the houses.
However, these persons have filed a writ petition in the Punjab High Court. The ministry has to wait for the final court order. However, Secretary Housing Abdur Rauf Chaudhry informed the standing committee that 29 of the houses had been vacated by their occupants.
This scribe drew the attention of Secretary Abdur Rauf Chaudhry, to the National Housing Policy, formulated by the Shaukat Aziz, a document that recognised housing as a basic and fundamental human need, and the fact that there were six million Pakistanis caught in the struggle to have a roof over their head.
When asked, whether the government had a scheme in hand to provide low cost housing for common masses, the secretary replied that this should be done in the private sector but the government would encourage all these activities.
In this regard Secretary Chaudhry referred to the 'Apna Ghar' scheme originated during the time of Nawaz Sharif, that planned to construct 500,000 low cost housing units, but he observed that the scheme had since been dropped. It may be mentioned in this regard that many real estate housing schemes are plagued with land grab offence and amassing millions of rupees from poor customers (members of housing schemes).
Standing Committee of both National Assembly and the Senate has spoken out strongly against such evil, which still persists. This very standing committee in its last meeting in October expressed its firm resolve not to allow any land mafia grab piece of the government land and to retrieve the official land currently under occupation by such elements. Kalsoom Parveen, Dr Abdul Khaliq Pirzada, Sardar Mehmud Khan, Syed Muhammad Hussain, Muhammad Saleh Shah attended the Senate Standing Committee meeting.