KARACHI: The Supreme Court will hear the case related to the encroachments over 35,000 amenity plots of the city at its Karachi registry on Saturday (tomorrow).
The apex court on November 29 had directed the Karachi Development Authority (KDA) director general and chairman of city’s district municipal corporations to get 35,000 encroached plots vacated in their respective jurisdictions within two months.
The apex court bench, comprising Justice Gulzar Ahmed and Maqbool Baqer, would conduct the hearing of a constitutional petition of Naimatullah Khan, the former city Nazim, and an application of a woman seeking contempt of court proceedings against authorities concerned for allotting her plot to another party in violation of the court order.
Earlier, KDA had informed the court that 35,000 plots of the city had been encroached upon through notorious China-cutting method. It said that the land worth billions of rupees had been allotted for illegal construction in different parts of the metropolis.
Upon hearing the arguments, the judges had said that this land could not have encroached without the connivance of the administration.
There is no place for pedestrians on the University Road as the service road was grabbed by the hotels’ management., and the encroachers use to construct boundary walls on the amenity plots then raise buildings, the court noted earlier.
The judges had observed that the lands were re-encroached immediately after the removal operations.
The Supreme Court had asked Karachi Metropolitan Corporation head, chairman of the city’s district municipal corporations—South, East, West, Central, Korangi and Malir—and local administrators to carry out the removal operations within respective jurisdictions and get the encroached land evacuated from the clutches of the grabbers within two months.
The apex court had also directed the KDA to cancel the leases and sub-leases granted for these 35,000 plots with an immediate effect.
