Peshawar Diary: New PDA DG & hitherto neglected Regi Model Town

PESHAWAR: Thousands of plot holders of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s oldest, incomplete residential project - Regi Model Town - have now attached expectations to the newly appointed director general of Peshawar Development Authority (PDA) to take practical measures and complete the remaining civil work so they could build houses and start living there.
Ammara Khan is the first female civil officer recently appointed as director general of the PDA.
She is an officer of the Pakistan Administrative Service (PAS) in BPS-19 and belongs to Lahore.
Before coming to KP, she was serving the Rawalpindi Development Authority (RDA) as its director general since 2019 and had also worked at the Lahore Development Authority (LDA).
She also served as additional secretary (admin), primary and secondary healthcare department from November 2017 till December 2019.
There are multiple challenges she will have to handle during her posting at PDA. The biggest challenge is to put the civic body on the right track.
Since almost all the successive governments in KP had adjusted their blue-eyed people in PDA, it has become difficult for the civic body to cope with the challenges.
Also, several people with strong political backing had been sent to PDA from other government departments on deputation and their only purpose was to get a residential plot in the housing project under the domain of PDA, either in Hayatabad or Regi Model Town.
“Not a single person is sincere with PDA. Everyone comes here with the sole mission to get a residential plot and recruit their near and dear ones in the PDA,” said an official of the civic body.
Pleading anonymity, he said that almost all the directors and their subordinates managed to get residential plots and left the civic body in trouble.
If the provincial government sincerely wanted to empower PDA to cope with these challenges, it would need to call back all the government employees sent there on deputation and recruit professionals to run the civic body.
The KP government announced a huge housing project, Peshawar Model Town having 81,268 plots forgetting that Regi Model Town, initiated in 1992, is yet to be completed.
The last DG PDA, Syed Zafar Ali Shah, had taken personal interest in genuine issues of the residents and plot holders of the Regi Model Town and made it mandatory for PDA to shift its offices there.
The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) government is the fifth one in the province that failed to complete the Regi Model Town launched 28 years ago.
The township comprises 27,000 residential plots and is stated to be the oldest and largest housing project of the province.
It was the first housing project in which most plots were reserved for government employees, including members of the armed forces.
Many plot owners and senior citizens died while anxiously waiting for the government to develop the project so that they could build their homes there.
Property dealer Nawab Khattak was among some of the plot owners in Regi Model Town who after being disappointed with the government launched Regi Bachao Tehreek (Save Regi Movement) to seek attention of the government towards the township.
None of the governments owned the project and instead left it at the mercy of land grabbers.
Many residents of nearby villages in Khyber district encroached upon a major portion of Regi Model Town and built houses in Zone-V which has become a permanent dispute now.
The housing project comprises five zones, but only Zone-III and Zone-IV are in possession of the government and many owners have built beautiful houses there.
However, the PDA failed to develop the remaining two zones - Zone-I and Zone-II - and retrieve Zone-V from land grabbers.
There are 10,000 plots in Zone-III and Zone-IV and the government didn’t complete development work in these zones.
The PTI is in power for the last eight years in KP but it couldn’t complete the civil works in Regi to enable the plot holders to build their houses.
There is no health or education facility in the Regi Model Town and the residents have to take their patients miles away to hospitals.
In Zone-IV, the PDA could not build a single mosque or park for the residents.
The residents told The News that when they met the PDA officials and asked them to build mosques and parks on designated locations in Zone-IV, they were told that the PDA lacked funds. They said they were advised to build mosques on self-help basis.
Another challenge for Ammara Khan is to ensure the presence of the PDA employees in their offices as most of them are stated to be involved in real estate business.