PESHAWAR: A Peshawar High Court bench on Tuesday issued the contempt of court notices to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Pervez Khattak and two others over the possession of a vast piece of land of the University of Peshawar’s botanical garden in Azakhel area by the Nowshera district administration in violation of the court’s order.

Justice Yahya Afridi and Justice Ishtiaq Ibrahim issued the order on a contempt of court petition filed by the University of Peshawar’s syndicate against the Nowshera district government’s act of cancelation of lease of the land given for the Botanical Garden and Centre of Bio-Diversity and taking of the possession of that land early this year.

The next date of hearing into the petition will be fixed later.

Apart from Chief Minister Pervez Khattak, the two other respondents in the case are Nowshera district nazim and CM’s brother Liaquat Khattak and deputy commissioner Iftikhar Alam.

Mian Muhibullah Kakakhel and Saifullah Muhib, lawyers for the petitioner, said On Feb 24, 2014, the chief minister had ordered the handing over of around 500 kanals of the botanical garden’s land for the setting up of two other universities, Air University and Technical University.

They added that on June 9, 2014, the high court had declared the said CM order illegal and that the government had challenged the verdict in the Supreme Court but later withdrew the petition.

The lawyers pointed out that despite losing the said case, the district nazim had issued an order on Feb 3 to cancel the lease of the land measuring 567 kanals and that the administration CM gets contempt notice in botanical garden land case had directed the UoP to hand it over to the government.

They added that while the high court issued directives to the respondents to maintain status quo on the issue, they took possession of the said land and locked the main entrance to the botanical garden.

Mr. Muhibuillah pointed out that there were various under-research unique species of fish and plants in the botanical garden, which needed great care on day-to-day basis and if they were not taken care of properly, the same would lose its worth.

The petitioner claimed that in Dec 2003, the UoP syndicate had approved the establishment of Centre of Plant Biodiversity, which included setting up of a Botanical Garden in Azakhel, Nowshera.

He said the Higher Education Commission in order to support the university in its efforts to establish the centre had sanctioned a grant of Rs37.861 million.

The petitioner said the Nowshera district government had leased out land measuring 689 kanals to the university to establish the centre through a lease deed issued on Dec 16, 2005 for a period of 99 years.

He said the Nowshera district government had issued a notice to the university in Dec 2015 showing its intention to cancel the lease and that after the university submitted a reply to the said notice, the district government issued the impugned order on Feb 3 canceling the lease of 567 of the total 689 kanals of land.

Published in Dawn September 7th, 2016