WITH the approval of three new sectors in Islamabad worth Rs30 billion, certain residents of the city can brace themselves for a new round of evictions and demolitions in the name of progress. Although this will — and should — spark legitimate resistance and a renewed conversation about the city’s master plan, we can also use this opportunity to ask ourselves a more fundamental question: why does the CDA even exist?

If you happened to be a dictator in the 1960s, it would have been one of your lesser crimes if you looked over undulating green hills and thought, ‘I probably need an authority to raze these and build a capital’. Nearly 56 years later, though, it is ludicrous to leave the governance of the capital city in the world’s fifth-most populous country to a non-representative bureaucratic institution.

Islamabad is not the sleepy town it was even one decade ago, and requires some serious urban planning if it is to avoid the congested fate of our other megacities. It requires an intra-city mass transit system, entire sectors dedicated to low-cost housing, mixed-use development, an equitable expansion of its water network, a functioning waste management system, and so on. The idealistic list of possibilities is endless. But these are not decisions that can be made without incorporating the will of the city’s residents and, as an unelected institution, the CDA simply does not have that mandate.

By no means does this imply that every decision the CDA has ever made is flawed or, on the contrary, that the opposite will be true for an elected local government. It only means that the mechanism for reaching such decisions must contain a certain level of accountability towards the people on whose behalf they are being made. In other words, the prerequisite is to have a system which enables representation.

Islamabad requires some serious urban planning if it is to avoid a congested fate.

The CDA is essentially no different to any other housing society, except their playing field is all of Islamabad — or at least those parts where it can use bureaucratic muscle to evict, rather than, say, cantonment areas. They see land — not the people who happen to live on it — and feel irked by the wasted potential of ‘undeveloped’ sectors which could be lucrative plots. This is the CDA’s bread and butter. It was never meant to govern the city, only to ‘develop’ it, and has been doing so in its own way. When looked at in this context, it seems obvious that the CDA is not a substitute for local government.

But what would abolishing this white elephant look like in practice? At the most, it would entail dismantling the entire institution. At the least, it would mean breaking its monopoly by placing it under the control of the Metropolitan Corporation of Islamabad, ie, the capital’s body of elected representatives. This would include legislative and constitutional amendments to guarantee election cycles and security of tenure — providing a legal and political foundation for local government. It would include administrative devolution, such as transferring the CDA’s nearly 20,000 staff to the MCI’s payroll.

Most importantly, this would entail a fiscal rearrangement. The idea that the primary source of income for a city is to sell its own land has to be revisited. Any revenue currently collected by the CDA or the ICT administration can be redirected to the public exchequer, that is, MCI — and bolstered by a comprehensive taxation system, which includes sources that are common to cities worldwide, such as property tax. At present, the CDA has a Rs150bn bud­get for the in­­coming financial year over which no control can be exerted by the residents of Islamabad.

This proposed arrangement is very much the opposite of what CDA has maintained with the MCI. Since the latter’s inception in 2015, the bureaucratic resistance put up by the CDA against the fledgling and ineffective MCI has been fierce. Within the first mayoral term, any powers it had been vested with were stripped away and returned, leaving the MCI entirely dependent on the CDA for finances, rather than the other way around.

Such a relationship cannot be changed by a tweak to the system, but only through a fundamental shift towards prioritising citizens over profits. With Islamabad as its birthright, the CDA has become very comfortable wielding power that should not belong to it. The fact that a democratic institution can be held hostage by unelected officials is not new to Pakistan, but it does seem to plague the system ranging from local governments to the top of the pyramid.

The writer works on cities, local governments and climate change.

Published in Dawn, July 16th, 2023