RDA tears out roads and sewers at three illegal schemes in Morgah

The Rawalpindi Development Authority demolished roads, manholes, sewerage pipelines and boundary barriers at three unapproved developments in Morgah on Saturday, in the latest round of enforcement against illegal housing schemes in the district.

The three sites

• Downtown Morgah, on Defence Road opposite Askari-14
• A land subdivision near Dhok Nawaz Graveyard
• An illegal housing scheme at Riaz Chowk, Morgah

RDA teams took out the internal roads and the infrastructure that had been laid, including manholes and sewerage pipes, along with the barriers put up around the plots. The operations were ordered by Rawalpindi commissioner and RDA director general Salman Ghani, and carried out under the Punjab Development of Cities Act 1976 and the RDA Building and Zoning Regulations.

The authority said it would keep acting against illegal construction, unauthorised development and unlawful commercial activity in its controlled areas.

What this actually costs a buyer

A demolished road is not the buyer's worst problem. The worse ones come later:

• No transfer. An unapproved scheme cannot give you a registered transfer. What you get is a file or an allotment letter from the developer, and it has no standing at the sub-registrar.
• No utilities. IESCO and Sui Northern connect approved layouts. Plots in a scheme with no approved layout plan wait, sometimes for years.
• Resale collapses. The moment a scheme appears on an enforcement list, the plot files in it stop moving at any price.
• Money already paid is hard to recover. Developers in this position rarely have the cash to refund, and the recovery route is civil litigation.

How to check before you pay

Ask the seller for the RDA approval letter and the approved layout plan for the scheme, with the number and date on it. Then verify that document with RDA itself rather than with the developer's office. A marketing brochure, a NOC application receipt or a sign on the site claiming approval is not approval.

If the scheme is inside RDA's controlled area and cannot produce an approval number, the plot is at the mercy of the next enforcement drive.

Running the numbers on a legal purchase

When you are buying a plot that does check out, the transfer costs are the part people underestimate. Stamp duty, the registration fee, the capital value tax and the town tax stack up on top of the sale price. Work out the full transfer bill on our stamp duty calculator, your annual liability on the property tax calculator, and convert marla, kanal and square feet on the plot size converter.

If the plan is to rent the finished house out, the rental yield calculator will tell you whether the asking price makes sense against the rent the area actually gets.

The pattern in Rawalpindi

Morgah, Defence Road and the Chakri Road corridor have been the busiest ground for unapproved subdivisions in the district, because farmland there is cheap and close enough to the twin cities to sell on a map. RDA enforcement has been running through these areas in batches. Anyone holding a file in an unapproved scheme in that belt should assume their site is on a list.