Karachi: Chairman of Pakistan People’s Party, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, has announced giving ownership rights to the houses of all the shanty settlements in Sindh in order to save them from getting demolished.
The announcement to this effect was made by the PPP Chairman at a ceremony to commence the project to give lease rights of houses to 8,000 dwellers of the shanty areas belonging to 19 different neighbourhoods of Larkana City.
Bilawal said the regularisation of shanty towns all over Pakistan should be done under the same policy, which had been available to Prime Minister Imran to regularise his private Bani Gala residence in Islamabad soon after coming into power.
He lamented that shanty settlements had been demolished in the country one after another giving the impression that all the influential quarters of the country had united to deprive poor people of their shelter.
“I’m saddened to see that regularisation of the Bani Gala residence and Bahria Town (a palatial gated township in Karachi’s suburbs) is regularised quite easily but regularisation of Karachi’s different shanty areas is a problematic issue,” Bilawal said.
He said Pakistan shouldn’t be a place where the working or middle-class people had to lose their life’s savings as had recently happened in the case of Nasla Tower in Karachi (the residential project demolished at the court’s directives). He said Pakistan instead should be a place where people belonging to every community and area got equal constitutional rights as envisioned by the late PPP leaders and former prime ministers Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Benazir Bhutto.
“The process I have commenced here today in Larkana will reach all over Sindh including Karachi,” said the PPP Chairman that is the ruling party in the province.
He announced that the People’s Party after coming into power in the country as a result of the next general elections would make sure that the residents of the shanty towns all over Pakistan got lease rights of their houses in the same manner.
