Forests at risk
A three-member
bench of the Supreme Court (SC) headed by Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Mian
Saqib Nisar expressed displeasure over the Sindh government’s foot dragging and
reluctance to recover hundreds of thousands of acres of state land, included
protected forests, illegally allotted to and grabbed by real estate developers
in the province. The petition being heard alleges a nexus between the Sindh
government and former president Asif Zardari on the one hand and real estate
developers such as Malik Riaz and the Omni group on the other in grabbing state
land illegally. The petition particularly refers to the deforestation of
riverine areas and the coastal mangrove forests in Sindh. But the petitioner
does not stop there, alleging statutory protected forest lands in Rawalpindi
and Lahore were similarly grabbed earlier. To the Sindh Advocate General’s
admission that 70,000 acres of land have been leased illegally in the province,
the CJP expressed astonishment that a provincial government that admitted
wrongdoing was doing nothing to recover the land. He said if the Sindh
government did not want to work, it should leave. Basically, the case revolves
around change in the status of protected forest and other state land to justify
its leasing to real estate developers. What further irritated the court was the
fact that on October 30, 2018, it had ordered the Sindh government to act in
the matter but the court’s directive was ignored. In November 2018, Sindh Chief
Minister (CM) Murad Ali Shah admitted in the Sindh Assembly that 149,235 acres
of land had been illegally occupied in the province by influential persons over
the last five years. The period in question and earlier similar shenanigans
overlap the tenures of the present CM and former CM Sindh Qaim Ali Shah and the
presidency of Asif Zardari. The modus operandi appears to have been to
officially change the protected status of forest land and other state land in
order to allow the land grab for the lucrative business of real estate
development.
While an irate SC
has asked the Sindh government to furnish a comprehensive report on the matter
before the next hearing at the SC’s Karachi registry on January 9, the whole
affair raises many concerns, some of which have found mention in the petition.
Sindh is not overly endowed with forests in the first place. The petition
points not only to the environmental damage wrought through such practices but
also underlines that Pakistan is a signatory to the UN’s Millennium Development
Goals 2005 and has pledged under it to raise the country’s forest cover from
its present 4.2 percent to 15 percent. Instead, the petitioner argues, citing
the case of change of status of forest and other state land for allegedly
malign purposes, the country is suffering incremental deforestation in Sindh,
Gilgit-Baltistan, Azad Jammu and Kashmir, the Margalla Hills, Punjab and
Balochistan. He might as well have thrown in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa too. However,
whereas the rest of the country suffers more from the illegal forest denudation
by the timber mafia, Sindh and Punjab seem to have been at the receiving end of
the real estate mafia, in collaboration with governments in these two
provinces. The case of Sindh is particularly dire, since the province is relatively
sparsely forested. Deforestation will inevitably result in lower precipitation
in the province, rendering an already ‘dry’ province even drier. On the one
hand successive Sindh governments have never tired of complaining about not
receiving their due share of river water from upper riparian Punjab, which may
carry some modicum of truth, and on the other hand they have allegedly colluded
with powerful vested interests to denude the province’s forests. Never was
there a clearer case of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
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