LAHORE: Cracking down hard on the Ravi Urban Development Authority (RUDA) and its pet-project to create a city from scratch on the bank’s of the river Ravi, the Human Rights Watch on Tuesday said authorities were “forcibly evicting thousands of farmers near the city of Lahore for a massive infrastructure project.”
“The authorities should enforce environmental protections and reform colonial-era laws that grant the government broad powers to acquire land for private as well as public use,” read the statement from the New York based NGO that conducts research and advocacy on human rights.
The contentious Ravi Riverfront project has been a hotly contested issue over the past few years. Under dispute are roughly 4,000 acres. For the farmers who live here this area is Ferozewala, a rich swathe of agricultural land directly fed by the Ravi and lush with guava orchards and seasonal plantations of maize, wheat, pumpkins, and other cash crops popular in farmlands close to the edges of Lahore’s peri-urban sprawl. For the officials of RUDA, it is Sapphire Bay — the location for phase one of the Ravi Riverfront Urban Development Project. And since they claim that the land is theirs, legally acquired and possessed, they are now within their complete rights to bulldoze and bully as they please.
Background to RUDA
The idea for a riverfront project on the banks of the Ravi is not a new one. In fact, it was first proposed as far back as 2006, and underwent a feasibility study in 2013 under the PML-N government.
Essentially, the Ravi riverfront is the plan to make a new city from scratch. The project would be Pakistan’s second-largest planned city after Islamabad, covering an area of 102,074 acres, catering to a population of up to 15 million people.
The foundation rock for the utopian riverfront project was first laid in 2019 with the passage of the special legislation that established RUDA. The authority would not work under any other body in or related to Lahore, and would have complete control over the project. The law went so far as to make a provision granted RUDA and its employees immunity from all legal proceedings, and “no court or other authority” can “question the legality of anything done or any action taken in good faith under this Act, by or at the instance of the Authority.”
Raging court cases
From the get-go, the warning signs were present. The law that had created and empowered RUDA seemed to go beyond reasonable limits because of the lack of accountability that the authority had to office. By early 2021, when the project was in its early stages of acquiring land, troubles began to rise when local communities resisted selling their lands to the state after which RUDA announced that it would feel free to acquire the lands by force — something that article 4 of the special legislation that RUDA created allowed. The matter went to court. In January 2022, Justice Shahid Karim of the Lahore High Court (LHC) in a 298-page long judgement declared that the scheme was “unconstitutional” on the grounds that it lacked a master plan.
Justice Karim said that the RUDA failed in preparing a master plan in accordance with the law as “all schemes are under a master plan”. The court noted that proper procedure was not adopted in purchasing agricultural land for the Ravi Urban Development project in Lahore and Sheikhupura, therefore, it declared the practice of acquiring the land through amendment in Section 4 of the RUDA Ordinance “unconstitutional”. RUDA was barred from acquiring land for the project.
The then prime minister Imran Khan immediately visited the project site and announced that his government in Punjab would challenge the verdict in the Supreme Court. Less than a month later in February, the Supreme Court threw out the LHC’s detailed verdict after less than 10 days of hearing and deliberating on the matter. The two-judge Supreme Court consisting of Justice Ijaz-ul-Ahsan and Justice Mazahar Ali Akbar Naqvi held that RUDA could continue working on lands it had already acquired, but barred it from undertaking any work on the ground beyond the lands that had already been acquired, possession taken and compensation paid.
Environmental impact
At the core of the issue is the ethos behind the project.he concept of the riverfront was to create a city along a raised riverbank. The end-goal was to revitalise the Ravi by building a series of barrages and rechanalising it.
Yet for all its claims that Ruda is a fix-all to save the environment, the research collected is doubtful. Experts, hydrologists, and environmentalists have all weighed in on the issue and reached the conclusion that it will be “an unmitigated environmental disaster.”
“Punjab provincial authorities have harassed and threatened area farmers to deprive them of their homes and livelihoods,” said Patricia Gossman, associate Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The authorities need to ensure that government projects minimise displacement and loss of income, but also minimise environmental harm and flooding risks.”
The HRW pointed out how environmental groups have raised concerns that the project’s proposed changes to the flow of the Ravi River could significantly increase the risks of flooding. Pakistan’s Sindh province experienced catastrophic floods in mid-2022.
The nongovernmental Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has called the Ravi River project environmentally, ecologically, and financially unviable, citing the Lahore Conservation Society’s findings that the proposed changes to the river are ecologically unsustainable. Environmental experts say that building barrages and other dams on the river and replacing farmland with paved areas could lead to higher water levels upstream and possible flooding.
