MANSEHRA: The residents, including local body representatives, have warned that they will take to the streets if the communication and works department doesn’t retrieve the illegally-occupied land along the Mansehra-Lassan Nawab Road.

“The communication and works department recently carried out a survey and found Manserha’s main road links with Pulrah and Lassan Nawab to be encroached upon by housing authorities and traders, but action against encroachers is still awaited,” Pulrah general councillor Habibur Rehman Tanoli told reporters here on Tuesday.

Accompanied by a group of residents, Mr Tanoli said the encroachment of the Mansehra-Lassan Nawab Road, which was already in bad shape, had inconvenienced travellers.

He said the road had many unplanned and unapproved housing schemes.

The councillor said the chief engineer of the communication and works department had ordered the survey, while a team led by SDO Sajjad Khan pointed out the land’s illegal occupation, but even then, no action had been initiated against encroachers.

Resident BakhtiarTanoli said the locals would stage a sit-in outside the deputy commissioner’s offices if the land wasn’t recovered.

He said the tehsil municipal administration hadn’t licenced any housing authority in the city and its suburbs.

The resident said the communication and works department should launch an anti-encroachment crackdown.

JUI-F GATHERING: Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Fazal provincial deputy chief Hidayatullah Shah has said his party’s chief, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, will address a public meeting here on Nov 26.

“Our [JUI-F’s] power show will change political scenario of the province,” Mr Shah told a gathering in Perhana area here on Tuesday.

He said the Pakistan’s Tehreek-i-Insaf government in the province had failed to deliver, while its leader, Imran Khan, was trying to sabotage the democratic process in the country by marching on Islamabad.

THESIS: Mian Luqman Hussain of the Geology Department at the University of Peshawar defended his PhD thesis.

He completed a research paper on ‘Multi-scale geospatial and geotechnical assessment of landslides along CPEC’ under the supervision of Associate Professor Mohammad Shafiq of the department.

Associate Professor Mohammad Basharat of the Azad Kashmir University was the external examiner, who assisted Prof Attaur Rahman of the UoP Geology Department.

The thesis was peer-reviewed by professors of Chinese and Dutch universities.

Published in Dawn, November 23rd, 2022