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Thursday March 28, 2024

Islamabad Model Girls’ College I-8/3 vulnerable to land grabbing

By Jamila Achakzai
March 09, 2018

Islamabad: With the land grabbing incidence high in the city, the absence of boundary wall has rendered a vast area of the Islamabad Model College for Girls, I-8/3, vulnerable to illegal occupation.

Ironically, the Federal Directorate of Education (FDE), which oversees the government’s educational institutions in the capital city, has been shrugging off its responsibility to put up the wall, though the college formally approached it many times in the recent years.

The Capital Development Authority (CDA) had allotted 6.01 acres of land for the construction of a degree college for girls in the sector in 2005. Though the FDE was quick to make the due payment in full, the civic agency gave out only 4.85 acres of land for the college.

The rest of the precious land located along the main road in the posh residential sector was reportedly allotted to the relatives of the CDA members. Initially, the relevant FDE officials didn’t even have the faintest idea of the ‘land fraud’. They learned about it only after the Pakistan Public Works Department handed over the college’s building in 2009 for the start of classes. The building was put up on 4.85 acres of land and not 6.01 acres allotted to the FDE by the CDA on paper.

The directorate took up the matter with the civic agency with a request for the immediate allotment of the remaining land. The CDA measured the college’s premises just to find the complaint to be right and allotted the sought-after 1.16 acres of land to it along with 0.12 acres with access from a nullah at a cost of Rs653, 400 in 2013.

Ironically, the allotted 1.28 acres land, which is located outside the main premises, has no boundary wall and thus, being vulnerable to land grabbing. The insiders insist that the administration has foiled many attempts to encroach upon the vast land.

Strongly feeling that the land can be turned into a playground after levelling to the benefit of students, mostly children of low-paid government employees, they complain that the administration had formally asked the FDE many times for the boundary wall’s extension, but to no avail.

They fear that as many local colleges, including the Islamabad Model College for Boys, Sihala, and Islamabad Model College for Girls, Bhara Kahu, and Islamabad Model College for Boys, H-9, had been a victim of land grabbing due to the neglect of the FDE, things won’t be different in the I-8/3 college case, too, in case of further delay in the construction of the boundary wall.

There are also reports that the college has no sanctioned posts of the teaching and nonteaching staff members since its formal opening in 2009, forcing it to borrow teachers from other educational institutions. The college is understood to have no share in the government’s annual budgetary allocations for the education sector.