BESET by legal challenges and landowners’ protests, the Ravi Urban Development Authority has lately drawn flak from the international rights body Human Rights Watch for forcibly evicting farmers and taking over their land to develop a controversial riverfront project just outside Lahore. In a statement, HRW has criticised the government for dislodging thousands of farmers to make room for the Ravi Riverfront Urban Development Project and urged the authorities to enforce environmental protection and reform colonial-era laws that grant the government broad powers to acquire land for private and public use. Launched in 2020 by the then prime minister Imran Khan, who claimed that it would address Lahore’s problems, including pollution, sewage, housing, water and employment, it has been opposed by environmentalists and rights activists from its very inception. They have argued that the proposed changes to the flow of the Ravi river would significantly increase the risk of flooding and displace and deprive thousands of families of their farmland, businesses and livelihoods.

However, even court orders and a series of protests by local farmers, business owners and labourers have failed to deter RUDA, which continues to act on behalf of property developers, and harass and forcibly turn out landowners from their homes and seize the land they have cultivated for generations. Scores of farmers resisting or refusing to hand over their land have faced criminal charges. After a change in the government in Punjab, it was widely expected that the caretaker administration would revisit the project, and reassess its human and environmental costs. But that hasn’t happened so far. The RUDA authorities continue to try and force the people give up their land and homes at throwaway prices. And for what? Just to help a handful of powerful property tycoons make easy money. Considering the massive financial benefits that real estate developers stand to gain from the project, one hardly expects the HRW statement to knock sense into the government authorities.

Published in Dawn, April 12th, 2023