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Fate of farmlands
By I.A. Rehman
No doubt housing is a basic need and industrial development is a must for the country’s progress but can Pakistan allow unplanned and unchecked industrial and urban settlements to gobble up good farmland? —APP/File photo
ON a recent drive from Lahore to Kot Radha Kishan via Raiwind one was struck by the emergence of large industrial estates and housing colonies on a land that was used until recent times only for farming. One could recall seeing green fields and rich crops across vast stretches in this area.
No doubt housing is a basic need and industrial development is a must for the country’s progress but can Pakistan allow unplanned and unchecked industrial and urban settlements to gobble up good farmland? It is this land that provides food-grains and valuable export commodities besides supporting a majority of the population. Is anybody looking into the problems caused or likely to be caused by a rapid shrinking of the country’s cultivable area?
Senior Lahoris get quite nostalgic while recalling the green fields where you find sprawling housing colonies, from Samanabad to Gulberg and the Township to the Defence Housing Authority. Their counterparts in Karachi and Islamabad have not forgotten the orchards of Malir and Saidpur. Ditto for Faisalabad, Multan, Hyderabad, Peshawar, Mardan and Quetta. And scores of towns like Sukkur, Burewala, Swabi, Muridke, Nawabshah and Okara offer similar stories of good farmland being swallowed up by fast burgeoning settlements, residential and industrial both.
The old rural system in which shamlat deh (common village land) was reserved for housing and community institutions collapsed long ago. The expanding network of roads has changed the structure of settlements from round clusters of houses to linear settlements along the roads and most of these have been built on traditional farmlands.
True, it is impossible to deny the pressure for industrial growth and housing but is there no way to reduce the loss of farmland to the minimum level possible? Has any agency compiled data on the reduction in Pakistan’s cultivable area as a result of the construction of industrial units, housing colonies, motorways, cantonments and other works of civil/military importance, and above all, brick kilns?
What makes one suspect negligence on this score is that the figure for cultivable area given in the Economic Survey year after year does not suggest that the loss of agricultural land to housing colonies etc is adequately taken into account. The total cultivated area in 1959-60 was 16.51 million hectares. It rose to 19.43 mh in 1967-68 and to 20.30 mh in 1980-81. The highest figure for the total cultivated area was recorded in 2001-02 (22.27 mh) but it declined to 21.17 mh in 2007-08. One should like to know if these variations reflect any changes in land utilisation other than those made by water-logging and land-reclamation projects.
Many years ago, while travelling in Germany one saw heavy machinery removing the top soil from farmland on the outskirts of a town. Inquiries revealed that the town council had succeeded, after many years of struggle, in getting its plan to construct houses on this land approved, subject to the condition that the topsoil of the fertile land would be removed and spread over a patch of uncultivable land some distance away. Our agriculture experts should not be unaware of the use of this technique (to save the subsoil microbes whose case Dr Akmal Husain had once pleaded — in vain).
What this small matter calls for is the beginning of a practice that whenever anyone wants to bring agricultural land under non-agricultural use, a mandatory environmental impact study must include an assessment of the loss to farming. This is necessary because we need farmland to provide work to millions of peasants at least for as long as they cannot find alternative sources of livelihood.
Some thought needs to be given to the vulgar and increasingly unaffordable practice of allowing anyone the freedom to set up a brick kiln wherever he wants or build as big a residential estate as he can pay for. If the process of encroachment on farmland continues unchecked, a time may come when four-kanal bungalows (to say nothing of 40-kanal farmhouses) will appear as an unpardonable wastage of economic resources. This is an additional reason (other reasons being dictated by culture and austerity) to fix the maximum size of houses in big cities.
Appeals are being continuously made by the authorities that the people should put up with all kinds of inconvenience and discomfort (for their own sake) caused by security concerns, such as closure of roads to ordinary citizens, difficulties in access to government offices, and frisking by ill-disciplined hands. While nobody dare deny the need for security precautions it should not be too much to expect the authorities to improve their act and reduce hardship for citizens.
You cannot drive to your bank if it is located in a highly protected building such as Lahore’s Wapda House, especially if the assembly is in session. Is it impossible to tell the people having banks in Wapda House to transfer their accounts to villages outside the Lahore corporation limits or to announce that the riyaya should stay at home when the lords of their destiny decide to meet?
Some security directives cause anger instead of amusement. For instance, the police chief of a sector in Islamabad has issued security guidelines in which he has asked the residents not to employ as domestic help persons (women and men both) belonging to two towns in central Punjab.
The reasons for the police officer’s hostility towards the two towns are not known. It is possible that a servant from the prohibited area was cleverer than him or maybe a politician or minister from there (past or present) had been harsh towards him. Be that as it may, the branding of the whole population of any town as criminals cannot be justified by any security law.
The curious case of the concessional power tariff allowed to Gen Musharraf sheds considerable light on the ways the state apparatus can find to suit ‘first class’ citizens and save them from being treated as B and C class citizens (that most of us are). Since the 40-kanal plot bought by Gen Musharraf is classified as ‘agricultural land’, and the applicant had paid for a transformer and cables (a press release mentions these things as favours done to Pakistan), the agriculture tariff for power will apply. Questions about the size of the house built on the plot or the use of electricity for non-agricultural purposes are irrelevant.
Thus, one way to favour somebody is to put him in a class different from other consumers. The second way is to increase the number of beneficiaries. If the net of favouritism is cast wider so as to benefit 229 households, beg your pardon, farmhouses, it is no longer favouritism. Pakistan Zindabad.
DAWN: Thursday, 09 Jul, 2009
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