Naimat Khan
KARACHI: Justice Supreme Court Justice Gulzar Ahmed on Saturday remarked that big dacoits were part of the Sindh Revenue department and if ban on transfer on land was lifted they will start distributing government lands among themselves.
“The officers are going in charted planes and holding weddings of their kids abr-oad,” Justice Ahmed further remark while hearing a petition filed by former Karachi mayor Naimatullah Khan.
During the hearing two-member bench – comprising Justice Gulzar Ahmed and Justice Maqbool Baqar – also ordered the authorities to put down all wedding halls, offices of the political parties and other illegal buildings that have been constructed on amenity plots reserved for parks.
Justice Ahmed said that city was ruined but irony is that no one take responsibility for this damage to the city.
Justice Ahmed warned that illegal buildings would not be tolerated on land allocated for welfare projects. He also asked as who was responsible for “building huge walls” on Sharea Faisal. The bench reprimanded Attorney General Sindh Zamir Ghumro for not taking any action against provincial officials involved in land grabbing.
“What is the Sindh government doing? What does it want us to do?” asked the exasperated Justice Ahmed.
“We don’t want to assume the government’s job.”
He regretted that the court had to interfere in administrative affairs when its job was to look at matters regarding the law and the Constitution.
Justice Ahmed also criticized the lavish lifestyle of government officers, wondering where they were getting the money to “charter private flights to get their children married in London”. Without naming names, he asked the AG if any action had been taken against the officer who was accused of doing so.
Justice Ahmed then told Ghumro to advise the mayor of Karachi and the chief minister of Sindh to step back and take a fresh look at Karachi’s condition.
Ghumro was also ordered to submit a complete computerized record of the provi-nce’s revenue along with de-tails of its standard operating procedures within a month.
Also, 648 acres of government land was still plagued with illegal encroachments added to the court’s annoyance with the city’s administration. The assistant commissioner of Kotri was summoned to the Karachi registry and was ordered him to remove all encroachments from the area within a month.
“Take indiscriminate action against everyone involved [in setting up encroachments on government land],” the bench told the bureaucrat, warning him that “no one will protect you if you are found involved in any irregularity”. The process of removing encroachments shall start from Sunday morning (today), the court ordered.
