1
HERE in Pakistan, we have more tales of grief and loss than many of us can bear, but some tragedies stand out with particular starkness.
I can’t stop thinking about the families who were hit by the bombings in Abbas Town, Karachi, struggling to cope with profound grief of multiple dimensions. One image that doesn’t leave my mind is of apartment buildings with their guts torn out, burnt out and mangled.
There will come a day when the residents will have to take stock of what they are left with. This will involve not just somehow developing scar tissue over the gaping emotional wounds, but also estimating where they stand financially. They have lost family and friends, and like the residents of Joseph Colony in Badami Bagh, they have also lost their homes.
And when this appraisal starts, they will find that in very different ways they have been hung out to dry by the state twice over.
First, and much more immediately, the state has failed to protect their lives and properties. It has done nothing for years while society in general veered towards a criminally discriminatory stance towards minority groups.
Second, the state has failed to develop laws that would give those whose homes have been destroyed a route of financial redress. (There are property laws, of course, but there are gaps and loopholes. And enforcement is difficult.)
People own homes and businesses and sometimes these can be damaged or destroyed through, as the insurance people put it, acts of God — natural disasters, riots, bombings, a plane falling from the sky, whatever. In terms of home ownership, if a person’s house is damaged or destroyed by an earthquake, to take a random example, he hasn’t entirely lost everything; he still owns and has rights over the plot of land.
What happens, though, when the home affected in this manner is an apartment in a building with several other apartments?
If the building is insured, there’s no problem; the insurance company would, after due paperwork, pay up and provide funds for repair. But buildings and homes generally tend to be uninsured in Pakistan.
So there are two or three scenarios that I can think of. The builder, if the overall building is still legally his, can potentially be responsible for repair (particularly if it can be proved that there was some flaw for which he was responsible which led to the damage in the first place).
But the way the law stands, a claim can only be laid against a builder or developer if a specific clause to this effect is in the contract that was signed upon purchase of the property. Instead, the clause usually present in such contracts in Pakistan specifically protects the builder.
If the builder is no longer involved in ownership, and all the apartments have been sold, then in case of damage or destruction there is every likelihood of fractiousness, depending on which apartments on which floors need work.
Assuming that each apartment is similarly sized, all 15 owners of the 15 flats in our hypothetical building have equal ownership rights; but while those on the third floor have no ground beneath their feet any longer, the ones right at the bottom still do. The latter could say, the problem is not mine. So what legal recourse is there for the former?
Another option: they could all somehow come to an agreement, which is difficult to imagine, to sell the plot and divide up the funds equally, but the maths works out to a mere fraction when you consider that a vertical building has more square yardage than the physical dimensions of the plot of land on which it stands — which is precisely why they are so useful in dense urban areas such as Karachi.
And so on … it is possible to come up with several scenarios of difficulty and none that occur for prompt resolution.
Insuring your home seems to be the simplest way out, but it is not the norm in Pakistan. And it’s easy to understand why, for it isn’t required by law or in any other way, and human nature tends to be optimistic: why spend when the likelihood is that nothing will happen?
Yet, consider cars. Not too long ago, it was not the norm to insure cars. But then, when banks started offering car leasing schemes, they made it mandatory. Now, attitudes have started changing and a fair number of vehicles are insured.
The same could work in terms of home-ownership, particularly apartments, and legislation could achieve this, as is the case in most if not all developed countries.
An equitable system could be devised so that the builder/developer and buyer has a fair share in buying the insurance, which the owner could then keep up to date. It is possible, after all, to devise insurance plans of different sorts so that a home can be insured against catastrophes of various kinds to a greater (more expensive) or lesser (cheaper) degree.
Other measures that could help people in such a predicament include the establishment of strong building management committees and an awareness of their importance and influence over owners and tenants.
Clauses could be added to standard rent/purchase agreements, making compliance binding by law. It might not be an act of God that affects you, after all; your flat could burn down if the neighbours, who’ve gone on vacation or are lazy, had an electrical fire.
With housing becoming an ever-pressing issue in Pakistan and high-rises increasingly seen as the answer, solutions have to be found — and a pressure group created to lobby for them.
The writer is a member of staff.
