ISLAMABAD   -   After failing to fulfil its tall claim of making the Capital Development Authority self-sustainable without selling commercial land banks, the incumbent management has once again decided to auction about 30 commercial plots in the coming month. The decision was made in a meeting held under the chair of Muhammad Ali Randhawa and attended by the rest of the board members. It was a practice in CDA to sell commercial plots from its land bank to feed the developmental and non-developmental needs. However, the incumbent management made a tall claim and announced not to auction more plots and decided to fetch revenue from other sources.

Successive failures in land auctions should be an indicator for city managers that solely relying on the authority’s land bank to generate revenue is not a viable option for the future. However, the city managers once again opted for an easy way of selling assets to run the house, which is not a viable option in any economic term.

Sources inside the authority informed that it is likely that the city managers would get cold response from the investors as it was observed in recent auctions due to ongoing slump in the real estate market.   “Gone are the days when the practice of selling commercial property against abnormal and exceptional rates and enthusiastic participation of real estate investors in the civic agency’s land auctions was in vogue”, an insider commented, adding, “the situation is much to the contrary now.”

Instead of making serious efforts to figure out viable and long term alternatives, the incumbent management is stuck with an idea to sell more plots to fuel its needs for a few more months irrespective of the fact that the recent auction had badly backfired as investors did not express their interest in said auction.     Sources said that the incumbent management is bowing down in front of the political pressures and trying to fund a couple of projects which are not under its direct domain.

Meanwhile, the board also decided to disengage a consultant for the construction of 104 family suites for lawmakers while a new consultant would be engaged through direct contracting under section 42-F of the PPRA rules. Under this project, 104 additional family suites and servant quarters were to be built in Parliament Lodges but the project could not meet the deadline due to multiple reasons. The project has been stuck since 2013 as it was started in May 2011 and was scheduled to be completed in November 2013.