IT’S 8:00am and I’m heading from my home, located in a newly established residential society sandwiched between Bahria Town Rawalpindi and the Public Works Department housing society, to my office in the city centre of Islamabad.

The society is some 25 kilometres from my workplace, and it has confusing municipal and territorial jurisdictions. It has been developed on land that falls under the revenue limits of the government of Punjab. But for legal and judicial purposes it falls under the jurisdiction of the Lohi Bhair police station of the Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT).

The residents like saying they live in Islamabad, but utility services providers, such as for electricity and gas, cater to them through their branches in Rawalpindi, which is in Punjab.

This society is one of the dozens that have mushroomed around Islamabad over the last couple of decades, either under government patronage or by the private sector. Some of them are completely illegal. Together, they have stretched the municipal limits of the federal capital beyond limits ever imagined.

I use the brakes more than the accelerator as I merge into traffic at the Islamabad Highway. This road has been declared an expressway, but has yet to be turned into the five-lane, signal-free facility as was promised.

Thousands of vehicles coming from the nearby towns of Rawat, Mandra, Gujjar Khan and others are joined by thousands more being disgorged on to the Islamabad Highway. On top of these there are the heavily overloaded trucks and trailers, passenger buses and vans, school and university transport, and so on.

As all this traffic crosses the Korang Nullah bridge, the point where the Highway actually turns into a five-lane expressway, more traffic pours on to it from the Judicial Colony and Gulberg Green. A frenzied flow of more vehicles from Rawalpindi joins the melee at Koral Chowk. It feels like the whole of Pakistan is converging on Islamabad, each vehicle striving to get ahead by all means.

Only a decade ago, late at night, the foolhardy would speed along this road in excess of 100kmph. But now, even at 2am, this is simply not possible. The population has grown so much that even in the darkest hours of night, there are a good number of vehicles on the road — and not just this one, but pretty much every road in Islamabad.

Along the Islamabad Highway, there used to be several villages, including Soan, Pindorian, Shakrial, Dhok Kala Khan, Koral and many others. The locals had set up buffalo sheds to provide milk to Islamabad’s residents. A visit to these areas at that time would yield a picture of cattle farms and dung. Sometimes, you saw more buffaloes than humans.

Some of the sheds still exist, but the villages have been converted into dense dens of humanity as people, a majority from the north, started migrating to Islamabad since the inception of the Afghan jihad in 1978-79. This inflow of internal migrants not only ended with overcrowding these villages, but changing the demography of the area as well.

Similarly, middle-class and upper-middle-class professionals and businessmen from Punjab and Sindh also started converging upon the federal capital to pursue their careers. They found these upcoming housing societies the best option to build or rent, avoiding the high costs of living in main Islamabad city.

Collectively, these societies have stretched the limits of Islamabad too far.

Bhara Kahu, once considered the first stop on way to Murree, is no longer a remote highway town but has emerged as a big ‘city’ abutting on Islamabad, with hundreds of thousands of people from the north-western tribal areas migrating here since the ‘war on terror’ was launched.

In the south-west, the construction of the new airport along the Lahore-Islamabad motorway has given a new lease of life to a number of old housing societies while many more have popped up almost overnight. Some of these societies’ limits are touching Attock district now. Likewise, the Capital Development Authority’s scheme for B-17 and other sectors spreading along the grand Margalla hills have taken Islamabad to the doorsteps of Taxila.

The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, in the provisional results of the census this year, announced that the ICT has the highest annual growth rate of 4.91 with its rural areas having the highest figure of 6.95 within Islamabad itself. In the past 20 years, the population of this region has more than doubled to 2.07 million, up from 805,235 in 1998.

But despite this alarming increase and the extension of Islamabad’s limits, the authorities continue to slumber. There is no sign of planning. The Capital Development Authority has not revealed any plan to extend basic civic facilities to the areas hosting the highest numbers of the population.

“We don’t cater to the rural areas,” says Mazhar Hussain, spokesperson for the CDA. “We are responsible only for the areas that fall under the metropolitan corporation limits. These rural areas should be dealt with by the district administration.”

But the district administration deals with rural areas in far-flung regions of the country.

Meanwhile, the inhabitants of these localities claim they “live in Islamabad, the capital and the first well-planned city of Pakistan”.

Published in Dawn, September 24th, 2017