The sea trees are best seen from space — for only the satellite’s eye can do justice to their fields of emerald (viridian) green florets. At eye level, that is, from an earthly vantage point, however, the mangroves of Hawkesbay look like a sleight of nature’s hand: for how do these overloaded prickly bushes sit on the water? Their secret is to stand on spindly legs cleverly concealed beneath its surface.

It’s not cool to admit it, but it’s notoriously difficult to summon the emotional energy to care about Karachi’s mangroves. Or read yet another article about them disappearing. They just keep disappearing. That’s all we read about them, or how they were once home to creepy crawlies we’re also supposed to care about, or eat.

The misfortune of this protected mangrove forest is that it is located miles away from the shacks and mansions of the city, perched at the rim of the Arabian Sea, where the breeze is cool and tangy with a lick of salt. As one of the last few places in Karachi untouched by concrete, this mangrove-filled lagoon is at risk, rendered vulnerable by its sheer size, an eye-watering 650 acres, and tragically so, by the promise it offers: space to build on.

Their eyes were watching

Shiraz and the other Baloch men were watching, standing 10 steps afar, when the wall started to go up around the periphery of the lagoon about two years ago. It was erected by driving H-column stakes into the ground eight feet apart and slotting precast concrete slabs between them. It is the cheapest, quickest way to cordon off an area.

Shiraz and the men who live in Haji Ahmed Goth work as caretakers for the Hawkesbay huts, which line the sand bar that separates the sea from the lagoon at the back where the mangroves live. These men had a feeling about what was going to come next. And, indeed, when the dumper trucks loaded with sand began to rumble in each day, 10 at a time, and leave nimbler and lighter by the time the sun went down, their suspicions were confirmed.

An environmental group had also been watching. Their access to the tidal mudflats and the mangroves in the lagoon had been shrinking for some time now, and this boundary wall was just a sign that more of it would disappear. However, they were too fearful of the ‘political’ influence on the land construction activity to speak up about it.

Satellite imagery from 2008 onwards provides incontrovertible proof that the mangrove-rich Hawkesbay backwaters have been deliberately ‘filled’ to turn them into ‘land’ for housing schemes. This barely perceptible metamorphosis was partly engineered by a method called sand trapping (see box).

The encroachers started building thin tracks in the water which act as traps because they don’t let sand exit after being flushed into the lagoon by the sea during high tide. As the left-behind sand sediments, the lagoon’s bed level slowly rose over time. Then all they needed to do was supplement this ‘reclamation’ with a little extra external padding.

“First they built a street and then they filled the land with sand from huge dumper trucks,” said a local, too fearful to give his name. Three men have already been killed fighting for the forest.

Beach City bingo

Clearly, the people behind this land reclamation would like to protect their handiwork. This is why the boundary wall started to go up in 2022 around the lagoon’s edges. But who in their right mind would buy a waterbody like this backwater and go to all the trouble to alter sea flow patterns and dump tons of sand?

Only someone who understood the value of real estate in Karachi.

To uncover the mystery, Dawn.com visited the land enclosed by a boundary wall and inquired with the security personnel present about the landowners and the project. “It belongs to Haji Adam Jokhio,” said one security guard summarily. He would not volunteer any more information.

Over the next few months, Dawn.com made several attempts to contact Jokhio for comment. The first such attempt was made on October 6, 2023, through his lawyer, Zia ul Haq Makhdoom, who declined to answer any questions or facilitate a connection. Following this, a reporter visited the site and asked the on-ground security to connect them to the owners. The security head got in touch on October 29, 2023, and promised to arrange a meeting with Jokhio. Despite several follow-ups, no meeting materialised.

During the course of this investigation it was revealed in official documents — such as the Record of Rights, letters issued by the Land Utilisation Department (LU) of Government of Sindh (GOS), property register for the city of Karachi, possession orders and payment challans issued by LU GOS — the owners of this land were “Usman son of Sadiq and others” and “Ari son of Haji Mehran and others” while Haji Adam Jokhio only had power of attorney of this land. Dawn.com made several attempts to trace both these parties, but in vain.

In July 2024, Dawn.com reached out to lawyer Haseeb Jamali, who is now overseeing the case Jokhio filed against the Sindh government over regularisation of the land being discussed in this piece; he said he could only share the facts of that particular case.

Dawn.com also reached out to the Land Administration & Revenue Management Information System (LARMIS), the department responsible for the digitisation of land records, seeking information about the property’s owners. However, a department official stated that the land, also known as ‘Deh Lalbakhar’, has not been officially notified, and therefore, they have no information on it. The official further explained that the property’s allocation was based on maps drawn during the British era, which means the property will not be digitised in the future, as ‘old maps’ fall outside the department’s purview.

In another attempt, Dawn.com reached out to Jokhio on his phone number and his office at Karim Housing but received no response. Finally, on May 13, contact was made with Lala Jokhio, one of Haji Adam Jokhio’s sons. On being asked about the land, he said “no comments”. He added his father would say the same.

So who is Haji Adam Jokhio and how is he connected to this piece of land at Hawkesbay?

This land is (not) your land

By now, we had a clear enough picture of who Jokhio was, based on information gleaned from newspaper reports about his past dealings, reports of NAB cases against him and background interviews with people who either knew of him or had been directly or indirectly involved in business dealings with him.

But it was essential to answer the question: how was he connected to the Hawkesbay land?

To find answers, we approached Keamari Deputy Commissioner (DC) Junaid Iqbal Khan, who was recently transferred after holding charge for more than a year. He was somewhat familiar with the long history of the case and cited official and court documents to answer our questions.

In the early 1950s, this Hawkesbay backwater was home to various salt works — named Lakshmi, Nusserwanji, Khurshid and the government salt works. When the salt dried up, the Government of Sindh took back the area as it was part of a scheme called K-28, Phase II, Trans Lyari on the right bank of the Lyari River.

“This wetland (lagoon) was a part of that scheme,” said the Keamari DC. The lagoon, situated adjacent to the mangrove forest, is being filled up to make it viable for construction.

However, this still did not establish the claim made by the security personnel at the construction site. So we started combing through official documents, where the story unfolded over hundreds of pages.

In 1993, two owners of the land — referred to as Usman and others and Ari and others — gave up two properties in Deh Konkar and Deh Kharkhao in District East (now District Malir) as they were needed by the authorities for a firing range.

In exchange, former chief minister Muzaffar Hussain Shah allotted them land (the land we are currently discussing) in District West (now District Keamari).

Since land in District East was less valuable than the land in District West, the owners paid extra to make up the cost. The extra payment was calculated to be Rs3 per square yard for this piece of land, termed as differential malkano.

Soon after getting the possession documents, available with Dawn.com, from the Deputy Commissioner West office — then headed by Fazlur Rahman — the owners gave Jokhio the power of attorney, which meant that he could do all the official work — relating to its documentation and construction — on the land except sell it.

Jokhio secured a no-objection certificate and approval for layout plans from the Karachi Building Control Authority [now Sindh Building Control Authority] on September 12, 1993, to build a real estate project here called Beach City Housing Enterprise.

But then Beach City, which was to be built on the wetland being discussed, measuring 313-acre part of Scheme K-28, phase II, Trans Lyari — hit a snag.

K-28’s many owners

If there is one nightmare associated with real estate projects in Karachi, it is contested land ownership. And Beach City Housing Enterprise was no exception.

As Jokhio pitched tents on the land and advertised the ‘Beach City Housing Enterprise’ project, employees of the Karachi Port Trust (KPT) — who had been paying Rs200,000 annually to the authority as lease for the same land on which they were told a ‘KPT united front workers housing society’ would be built — started protesting.

In all fairness, before its desiccation, the land was nestled within the backwaters of Karachi. These backwaters were part of the territory given to the KPT by the British government under the KPT Act in 1886 so they could manage the port.

To verify the KPT’s claims of jurisdiction, Dawn.com requested maps from the KPT office, but were directed to the Ministry of Maritime Affairs by the KPT PRO. Despite multiple attempts to contact the ministry’s PRO from October to November 2023, we received no response.

KPT believes they own the land and they are to decide how it would be used. Thus in 1990, when a part of their backwater territory dried up, KPT launched a ‘KPT united front workers housing society’ on 500 acres of land.

Following the advertisements of ‘Beach City Housing Enterprise’, KPT issued a public notice, a copy of which is available with Dawn.com, warning the public not to do any transaction relating to this land as it belonged to them.

According to a Dawn report, the KPT Cooperative Housing Society issued a press release stating that they have filed a suit against the sponsors of Beach City Housing Enterprise in Sindh High Court.

KPT officials refused to comment on the issue, stating that the matter was sub judice.

Fortunately for Jokhio and co, things did not end here.

Reversal of Fortune

Around six years later, the government introduced an ordinance called the Sindh Government Land (Cancellation of Allotments, Conversions and Exchanges) Ordinance 2000 and in one clean sweep, the government struck down all land allotments, conversions, or exchanges of state lands done by its officials between 1985 and 2000.

The ordinance was introduced to combat the corruption done by government officials and elected representatives in which they allotted thousands of acres of government land to influential people at rates lower than the market value.

But concessions were to follow. A year later, a committee was tasked with setting the ‘real’ price of the land. If the person who had initially bought it at a bargain price managed to pay the actual cost, they could own it. Some K-28 plot owners coughed up the cash and regained their land. Among them were Jokhio and his partners.

Swiftly, Jokhio aligned himself with the collective of plot owners in scheme K-28 heading to the committee, aiming to ascertain the true value of the land, confident in their ability to pay the actual price.

By 2009, the committee decided that if Jokhio could pay Rs92 per square yard for the land, it would be given back to him.

Despite the allotment of this land being questioned, the land committee issued an order for the regularisation price of this plot — perhaps a lack of oversight?

Meanwhile, Jokhio and his partners struggled to pay and a decade later, by 2019, had managed to pay the price for only half of the total area.

By this time, however, as government officials dragged their feet on legalising the property, Jokhio went to the Sindh High Court, which ordered the government to legalise the land and let the aggrieved parties pay the remaining amount.

In 2023, Jokhio bought the remaining 160 acres by paying a price differential of Rs92 per square yard and received regularisation papers for both properties. It is important to note that Rs92, as a differential cost, was said to be a fair market price in 2009. More than a decade later, the fair market price must surely have seen a radical spike.

For instance, the price of residential area land in the 1990s was — according to an ad of a housing scheme in the area — Rs200-Rs450 per square yard. Today, that same residential land at this location — according to real estate agents — costs around Rs 24,755 per square yard.

Three decades after staking a claim to the land, Jokhio and his partners became its legal owners by paying a fraction of its current value. Soon after, he started building a boundary wall around what had now come to be called a plot.

Except, his plans for the land seem to have hit a snag again.

We own it — though we have no right

In 2022, when the wall started to go up on the same land, a KPT anti-encroachment official sent his staff to investigate but they had to retreat as the other party had armed guards. The KPT official said they could not get a hold of SSP Keamari Fida Hussain Janwari to file a first information report (FIR).

By July 4, 2022, KPT’s secretary wrote a letter, available with Dawn.com, to the Sindh chief secretary and Karachi Commissioner to complain that people were taking over what was formerly called the KPT Employees Housing Society.

He had to use the word ‘formerly’ because in 2020, the then Chief Justice of Pakistan Gulzar Ahmed had made it “crystal clear” in an order that the guardians of the port had no power or authority to lease out, transfer, or sell KPT property or land for housing to its staff.

The court observed that the Karachi Port trustees act on behalf of the government only when it comes to affairs concerning the management of the port. Hence, any KPT united front workers housing society is illegal. The work on the boundary wall was also halted after the court order.

The Keamari DC too said that the construction of the wall around the lagoon has been temporarily halted. He added that a divisional court is set to hear the case again.

“The decision to reassess the case arose when a single-judge bench noted that the divisional bench, responsible for ordering the regularisation of the land for Usman & others and Ari & others, might not be aware of the Supreme Court’s directive to maintain ‘status quo’ on the land,” he explained.

And just as easy as it was to acquire the land, it was easier for it to become bogged down in intra-governmental controversy. Such is the nature of fractured governance in Karachi that what one hand giveth, the other taketh away.

Moreover, the KPT isn’t the only government entity that has staked a claim on the land. One more authority that claims ownership is the Lyari Development Authority (LDA), which is responsible for the development of the area.

The LDA has taken the Board of Revenue to court, arguing that the government could not have allotted land in K-28 phase II as it had no authority in the area. Moreover, the K-28 phase II allotments overlapped with the area designated for LDA’s Hawkesbay Scheme 42. This case has been languishing since 2009.

The ambiguity surrounding this area’s ownership is thus being battled out in several court cases. For the purposes of this article, we had to scour through 74 documents and nine maps (and these were only the documents we were able to uncover).

The more documents you come across, the deeper you can assume the corruption goes. If you ask Amber Alibhai of NGO Shehri — Citizens for a better environment, which fights land grabbers in Karachi’s courts, “Many times, too much documentation is done to convolute the truth.” In any other part of the world, multiple government papers would be markers of veracity. Not so in Karachi.

As our ring binders of government and court records grew fatter, the list of people who would go on the record for this story shrank. No one wants to be quoted when it comes to Hawkesbay K-28, Phase II, Trans Lyari. “A similar development was in process a decade ago, and when I attempted to take pictures, I faced threats,” said Shehzad Sadiq, Director of Forest Operations.

When Dawn GIS mapped out phase II of the K-28 scheme and land allotted to Jokhio as per the District Keamari office, it was found that the plot was not a part of the original boundary of the scheme.

By delineating boundaries based on the constructed wall, it was discovered that Jokhio had relinquished his initial allotment of 313 acres and claimed approximately 600 acres of land as his own.

Sandcastles in the air

Even if Jokhio and Beach City cleared the court circuit, they would have to contend with the Sindh Environment Protection Agency. As it turns out, SEPA has summoned the builder, according to Deputy Director Keamari Kamran Khan, as the housing project has no Environmental Impact Assessment[10] [11] — a document that provides an overview of the existing environmental situation of the project area, reveals potential environmental impacts which can be beneficial and harmful, with suggestions on how to enhance beneficial effects, mitigate or minimise potentially harmful impacts.

If experts went about trying to assess the impact of building Beach City, they would most certainly fail the project. To begin with, the mangroves in the disputed area have been declared a ‘protected forest’ by the Forest Department, making any cutting subject to penalties, as per Sadiq, the director of Forest Operations.

The reclamation tricks have so far disrupted the area’s ecosystem by messing with its water sources. A barrier was erected between the mangrove forest and the wetland. This disrupted the two-way natural flow of water. During high tide seasons, seawater flowed into the mangrove forest, flooding the wetland. Alternatively, when it rained, that water from the surrounding area collected in the mangrove wetland before eventually making its way to the sea.

In addition to seawater, this sink-like lagoon also receives water from three streams in the city. And as it is topographically low, it acts like a natural catchment area (that “catches” the water). “The flood water from surrounding hills first accumulates here before flowing into the sea,” said Dr Salma Hamza, Senior Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Bahria University. “This rainwater fulfils the needs of the mangrove forest, which needs 50 per cent freshwater and 50pc saltwater.”

Sadiq said that if the natural waterways of the mangrove forest are blocked, the declared protected mangrove forest will only survive for a short time. These plants need water from the sea and sky, depending on this delicate sodium balance to survive.

Dr Sher Khan, a marine biologist who had recently visited the mangrove forest, said, “The ground and the water have brackish colour, which indicates that there is a high quantity of sulphur on the land.”

Since the mangroves are mature, they are not as impacted by the sulphur, but the meiofauna — small invertebrates that live in backwaters — are alarmingly absent. Khan said if a housing society is built in this area, the people there could develop respiratory issues and skin diseases. “It is best if the area remains undeveloped for both humans and the biodiversity of the area,” he stressed.

Data from Google Earth, however, shows that mangrove forests in the area have shrunk from 1990 to 2023. To assess deforestation, Dawn.com contacted the National Institute of Oceanography for GIS data but they refused, citing low-quality pictures. When pressed, an expert termed it “too political.”

“When it rains for five hours, the entire area becomes inundated so much that we can’t drive or walk on the road,” Shiraz says. “But the rainwater clears off after a few hours because it goes into the sea.” Water fills up till Machli Chowk with its skeletal sculpture, but then it flows into the sea.

If they build in the mudflats and mangroves in the wetland behind the strip, however, the water will not drain as the ecological architecture will be permanently altered. According to Shiraz, they built stormwater drains or nullahs but they have not been tested because it didn’t rain this year. These small nullahs will not be enough to control or handle the water flow, he says, because the pressure is very high.

As the legal dispute about the ownership of marshland continues to unfold in courts, multiple unsuccessful attempts have been made to conduct anti-encroachment operations on the boundary wall.

However, as is the case with most of this city’s green or historic assets, our ability to exert our civic will upon them is inversely proportional to the terminal velocities at which they cease to exist. All you need to know is that if a real estate project starts selling flats in what used to be a mangrove forest, you can decide not to live there.

Special thanks to Dawn GIS team, Mahim Maher, Advocate Zubair Abro and NGO Shehri — Citizens for a better environment.

• Dawn.com reached out to the Secretary of the Ministry of Maritime Affairs several times but received no response.
• Dawn.com reached out to WWF-Pakistan but did not receive a response or any requested data.
• National Institute of Oceanography Pakistan refused to comment on the matter deeming it “too political”.
• Dawn.com reached out to DG Sindh Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) several times but received no response
• Dawn.com reached out to Younus Dhaga, caretaker Board of Revenue (BOR) minister and senior member Baqaullah Unar but received no response.