The real estate sector has shaped into an uncontrollable monster that ruthlessly spread its jaws over the cultivated land, barren hills and posh areas in the megacities, without complying with essential regulatory requirements and environmental and social codes in the country. The real estate mafia takes advantage of weak regulation and lax governmental control and blatantly plays with the public need to have a house.
The housing societies’ owners first trap the public by showing pleasant dreams and then exploit them by fleecing their hard-earned money. So far, almost every other individual invested his pension, commute or lifelong savings in pursuit of his desire to build his adobe, a majority of them had been entrapped in an unending wait for the completion of the project, handing over of plot/ flat or paying out courts/ prosecutors’ fee to get their hard-earned money back from the fake developer and corrupt property dealers.
In the majority of the cases, the property tycoons launch their housing societies without getting NOC/ approval from the concerned department and afterwards declared as illegal as happened in the case of Islamabad’s Ghouri Town and hundreds of others, while in other cases, the owner had invested the collected money elsewhere delaying the development and possession of plots/flats as happened in the case of Bahria Town Saqlain Mushtaq Heights.
Meanwhile, several investors unjustly charge their clients repeatedly either in the name of development charges or bogus expenditures other than the specified plot price as recently surfaced in the case of Bahria Town Phase-8 Extention and Bahria Orchard, wherein society owners planned to grab millions of rupees from customers to fill their pickets and pay for their political adventure with the previous government.
Amid all those public agonies and malfunctioning of real estate mafia, the relevant government institutions such as RDA, CDA, LDA, PDA and others along with the judiciary and Police, the FIA, the anti-corruption department and NAB are just playing the role of spectators instead of taking stern measures against the culprits. Realistically, this cruel and hateful business has flourished over the past three decades and countless cases of fraud, fake housing societies and non-deliverance of projects occurred in the past but the government authorities did nothing to forestall such incidents except making money by issuing NOC and approval of fraught maps etc.
The situation is really worse and the government must lay out a transparent and time-bound procedure, fix land prices, and development charges, along with ensuring the provision of utilities, and essential recreational and social amenities for each society/ project so that the real estate mafia neither dodges the public nor escapes the writ of the law.
