The crimes of Punjab’s real estate developers are drowning us

Din Muhammad sat perched on his charpai as it rested slightly tilted on a small mound of dirt. Cars whizzed past him barely a dozen feet away. The traffic on the M2 was subdued early in the morning and offered little distraction to Din and the long line of people that found themselves camped out on the side of the highway with their families, cattle, and whatever belongings they could carry with them.  “People from the government came two nights ago and told us to evacuate. Some people from within the village did not want to leave and advised us against it but the government kept pushing. Eventually we grabbed our essentials and left,” he explains. His eyes are fixated on the scene in the distance.

Right next to the motorway’s Babu Sabu Interchange close to Thokar Niaz Baig, the main entry point to Lahore, one can see nothing but water from miles. From a distance the water seems timeless. Like it was never not there. But it does not take long to notice what is poking out of the water. Golden three-pronged street lamps and billboard with the half visible words “New Metro City Lahore”  This is the site of one of the many real estate development projects that have been taking place close to or smack dab in the middle of the banks of the Ravi River. Even as he speaks with us, Din Muhammad’s eyes remain fixated in the distance, his responses come delayed.   

“He is looking for our buffalo. When we left the village we brought all five animals with us. One of them wandered off in the middle and we haven't seen her since,” his wife says from the foot of the charpai where she is attending to their children. “The buffalo we lost was the healthiest in our herd and gave the most milk. He’s worried she will be lost in the waters now.”  This is only one story of the more than 250,000 people that have been displaced and more than 15 lakh that have been affected by the ongoing flood in central Punjab. The situation is only set to get worse. As the water flows South, government authorities have already begun preparing for the three flooded rivers, Ravi, Chenab, and Sutlej, to rush into South Punjab and eventually meet in the Indus River in Sindh.

The unprecedented flow of water follows the extreme pressure on these rivers upstream in India following heavy monsoon rains. In the past few years, the monsoon rains have increased in intensity, volume, and timing. Further on in Punjab the situation remained bleak. Profit visited a number of areas including Hafizabad and other districts affected by both the Ravi and Chenab rivers. Even along the M-2, from Pindi Bhattiyan onwards the Chenab has overflown with no views but water for miles. The only indication that there was once farmland there are the tops of barely visible trees.

Since the floods have struck, the entirety of the state machinery has been on its toes and engaged in rescue work. Despite some poor PR choices like Maryam Nawaz deciding to take a boat ride on the flooded river surrounded by her cabinet lackeys and protocol flunky babbus, the response has largely been robust.  The Flood Forecasting Division has shown alertness and efficiency. District administrations have acted quickly and forcefully to get people to evacuate areas where the FFD has informed the flood will hit despite the apprehensions of the local populations. The PDMA has been responding fast and a massive deployment of state forces has kept casualties to a minimum. Already the district machinery in South Punjab is working overtime to ensure minimal damage as the flood travels South. The Sindh Government, surprisingly, has also been on its toes. 

There are many elements to this flood. The first, of course, is the rescue operation and minimising the damage that so many have faced as a result. There is the problem of agriculture and the impact this will have on next season’s wheat crop and this season’s rice harvest: an issue that could well affect our food security next year. Then there is climate change, the results of which ravaged us only too recently in 2022 when the last major floods hit the country. But we must begin, first and foremost, with Lahore. Because nothing encapsulates Pakistan’s response to challenges like this more than the blatant hubris that has led to so many real estate developments on the bank of the Ravi. 

New Metro City Lahore, which is currently submerged in water and awaiting some sort of draining, is a pet project of BSM Developers, the real estate company owned by Bilal Bashir Malik, who is the grandson of property tycoon Malik Riaz. But the Riaz family is not the only one that took advantage of the Ravi’s natural course. Lahore’s Park View Society, owned by Ahmed Aleem Khan, has probably been the worst affected by the floods. Almost the entirety of the society is submerged. Its houses, selling at Rs 1.5 crores for a five marla place, have water inside them. Residents had to shift floors and be rescued by boat in many of its blocks. Overall, there are nearly 80 housing and real estate projects close to or on the banks of the Ravi. Of these, 47 societies are illegal, 14 have planning permission, another eight have technical approval, and eight more have final approval. Despite this, nearly all have started development work on their projects.   

Even in the ones that are approved, there are serious concerns about the political maneuvering and influence it took to get the job done. And while there is a vast web of developers and politicians with deep interests in these many projects, the central lynchpin to this story is one organisation: the Ravi Urban Development Authority (RUDA).

Starting from scratch

The Ravi broke free this weekend. As the waters swelled downstream from the massive release from India’s major dams, the river began to climb to areas it has not regularly occupied in living memory. There was a time when the Ravi would run along the walls of Lahore’s gates. During the monsoon season, it would pass by the Badshahi Masjid and touch the walls of the Lahore Fort. 

The river has changed course since. It has shrunk and much of the river bed has been exposed, particularly in the summer months when it is often a sorry sight. But the thing about nature is you cannot mess with it. Human hubris and the desire to subjugate nature has always led to economic and social disaster. Humanity’s place in the world demands a respect and reverence for nature that has gone missing. 

Rivers, for those that study them, are as good as living beings. They have personalities, moods, whims, the capacity for both cruelty and kindness. Most importantly, rivers have rights and homes. And no matter what happens, even if a river recedes to a point of nothingness, the day it decides to reclaim its space nothing stands in its way. That is something of what we are seeing in this year’s floods that is different from 2022, when hill torrents in Sindh and Balochistan caused havoc because of excess monsoon rains. This year is a case of the river taking back what is historically its path. Ask Dr Hassan Abbas, Pakistan’s leading hydrologist, and he will tell you the extent of the disaster that messing with a river can be. 

“This is an unmitigated environmental disaster. When you start to mess with a river you mess with nature,” he says. 

It is a simple rule of life that does not seem to have penetrated the hefty skulls of the masterminds behind the Ravi Urban Development Project. 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. The idea has long been a lucrative if elusive pipe-dream. Lahore, as many are aware, has swelled up and its urban sprawl has seen it become one of the most polluted cities in the world which regularly tops the global rankings for the worst air quality. 

Decades of unbridled real estate development, unsustainable horizontal growth, and massive coal power plant projects in adjoining cities have left the ancient Mughal capital on the path to being unlivable. There is much that could be done to solve Lahore’s problems. For starters, a viable network of public transport could reduce the city’s growing traffic congestion and restrictions on real estate development and the encouragement of vertical growth could help contain the sprawl. Investments could be made for forestation and an overall plan to make the city more high-density, more walkable, and most importantly more liveable.  Ideas like the Ravi Riverfront Urban Development Project are the sort of sweeping solutions that populists like to extoll. 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. It is an ambitious undertaking — one that is born as much out of a sense of frustration with the state of our urban centres as it is out of necessity. In fact, in a comprehensive and eye-opening article published in Dawn back in June 2021, it was pointed out that the development of new cities and riverfront projects is not unique to Pakistan, and that such projects and several new cities have been planned across Asia and Africa in recent years. 

It is essentially a desire to start from scratch. To plan and control and build a city with the benefit of hindsight. 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. In fact, the Lahore Development Authority (LDA) and similar bodies in Gujranwala and Sialkot would be subservient to RUDA. So complete were the powers given to RUDA that not only was the authority entrusted with the entire responsibility for the project from planning, to acquisition, to development that the legislation which created RUDA granted  the authority 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.”

Hue and cry 

The formation of RUDA naturally met with resistance. 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. Eventually, RUDA’s fate ended up in the courts, but it was clear there were plenty of political interests in the mix. 

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. It was a technical point to hold over them. No focus was paid to the wide powers RUDA was suddenly given that made it essentially free from accountability. Sensing the moment, the 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.  Profit has covered the saga that followed extensively before Read on: What in the world is RUDA doing?

Wild Wild Ravi

But two major issues persisted. The first was that RUDA continues to operate as a development authority with wide jurisdiction. That means if you are making a real estate project close to the Ravi, your regulatory body will be RUDA. While RUDA itself was working on its Chaharbagh development a little further away from the river, other societies were cropping up. Some had approval from RUDA others didn’t. What RUDA’s presence did do, however, was turn the area around the Ravi, including the riverbank, into a sort of free for all. 

Take Park View City for example. This was the project that ended up being the reason for the falling out between Imran Khan and Aleem Khan, who was once considered a strong contender from the PTI to become Chief Minister of Punjab, and remained Senior Minister in the Buzdar cabinet. 

The Park View Project has been in the works since at least 2004. Back in the day, the project was originally named “River Edge”. The irony of this is not lost on the society’s residents, whose houses are submerged in 7-10 feet of water. “This is the major governance issue in our river system. Housing societies and infrastructure on riverbeds are always going to come under water at some point,” says Hussain Jarwar, the CEO of the Indus Consortium, a think tank that works with river communities in the Indus Delta. 

“The Ravi, Chenab, and Sutlej, are Eastern rivers that India uses. Their natural waterway has been empty because of the Indus Water Treaty. People end up building on these empty banks and if ever there is a release of water they end up submerged.” 

The presence of real estate projects on the riverbanks is a direct result of these empty spaces. “We have seen in this recent flood that there is a serious need for zoning. Land is being used for purposes that it should never be used for,” says Minister for Climate Change Dr Musadiq Malik. 

Dr Hassan Abbas concurs. “We have built so many dams in this area that they end up stopping small floods and drying these rivers up during normal times. This gives people the impression that the water will not return. But all of these man-made dams are built with a particular capacity. When that capacity is exceeded, everything in the river’s path will go,” he says. 

In the case of the two societies Profit visited, Park View and  New Metro City Lahore, it was clear that these societies had been built with some political influence and should never have been allowed in the first place. Take Park View for example. It had actually raised the ire of RUDA, which took action against it because it felt this was an are in its jurisdiction. After Aleem Khan’s falling out with Imran Khan, the project was stalled. The PTI’s minister in the Punjab Government at the time, Mian Aslam Iqbal, said the project was illegal and Aleem Khan kept building it because the Lahore Development Authority was in cahoots with him. 

However when Aleem Khan joined the coalition government in 2023, he got major relief as the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) closed an inquiry against him for allegedly occupying and encroaching public passages and illegal extension of the Park View housing society both in Lahore and Islamabad under the new accountability laws. The case of New Metro City Lahore is similar. At the time that it was built, it was a project of Malik Riaz’s grandson. Profit has done stories on both these societies before. 

Read more: Up the river without a paddle

Read more: The barefaced lies of New Metro City

What matters, however, is that land developers have clearly had their eyes on the Ravi riverbed for decades, especially since the river has shrunk over time. They did not care for any environmental assessment, and in many cases built unapproved societies over its banks. The maps from Google Earth show just how bad the shift in greenery next to the rivers has been. They should never have been allowed to be made in the first place. 

The climate impact

Environmentally, the project posed major problems. Behind the project was a concept, and it was not just to create another city to give Lahore some much needed respite. The 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. 

Taken at face value, the riverfront project is an attempt to exert control over the Ravi. RUDA claims that to avoid flooding, revive the Ravi, and ensure more equitable water distribution it is necessary to recanalize the river by building a series of barrages and raising its embankment walls. To afford the project, they are planning and developing the riverfront project which will fund work on the river.  In this vein, RUDA has regularly tried to portray itself as an environmental necessity. On March 21 this year for example, soon after the SC’s verdict, RUDA claimed that the water in the Ravi was toxic and any produce grown through it was bad for the health.

Yet for all its claims that Ruda is a fix-all to save the environment, the research collected is doubtful. “These are all excuses. Hands down all of them. They are claiming that they are raising the embankments to make sure that the river can carry more water to avoid flooding for example. This is ridiculous hydrologically speaking. This means that if there is a high amount of rainfall, as there was this year in Sindh and Balochistan, the walls will be so high that water will begin to collect outside the walls and have nowhere to go — flooding the fields on either side,” says Dr Hassan Abbas.

“This is an unmitigated environmental disaster. Trying to control it is not going to work. Then there are also dams on the Ravi, and if they ever have to open those dams a situation like the great floods of 1992 might occur again. They have no solution and all of these claims are mere eyewash. Recanalisation is absolutely wrong as a concept, and this is all an excuse to give development groups and real estate moguls stakes in this area,” he claimed. 

Meanwhile, a 2021 report commissioned by RUDA found that much of Ravi City’s impacts on ecological resources would be long-term and irreversible. And as the earlier mentioned Dawn article pointed out, that “in spite of this, the EIA report concluded that the project will have an ‘overall positive impact’ on the entire ecosystem, and deemed the strategic development plan of the project ‘feasible’ at the proposed location, as long as the recommendations made in the report are implemented in ‘true spirit’.” 

“One struggles to reconcile the optimism of the Ruda EIA with the findings of a feasibility study of a similar Ravi project considered by the PML-N government in 2013. The study concluded that there was no water in the Ravi to make its riverbed an attractive real-estate proposition.” 

What should have been done

The answer is simple: let the rivers flow. Rivers cannot be controlled. We have learned over time that this is the case. In Europe as well there is a clear shift towards allowing rivers to take their natural course and building forests around them. In Punjab as well, to create these real estate projects, naturally occurring forests around these rivers are cut down. 

These forests are forces that stop the flooding. Instead, we build residential real estate in their place. This is simply tempting fate. There is no controlling a river, and particularly the Indus River System, especially with the added effects of climate change. The only question is, will policymakers and the government learn anything from this disaster? 

The current response to the floods has been efficient and well coordinated. Ministers are on the ground, the workers of Rescue 1122 and other organisations have shown great heroism in helping evacuate at risk people like Din Muhammad and saving lives. However, it needs to be made certain that they are not called on to do so again. The only solution is to let the river run on its natural course, and to treat our natural systems with respect and reverence. Without that, the next tragedy is not a matter of if, but when.