Railways Ministry told to retrieve land from ‘grabbers’

[Naveed Yaseen]

* Senate body says transport mafia major hurdle in making Pakistan Railways a ‘profitable entity’

Staff Report

ISLAMABAD: The Senate Standing Committee on Railways, on Tuesday, directed the Railways Ministry to step up efforts for retrieving 4,231 acres of its land occupied by various land grabbers.

The committee, chaired by Maulana Gul Naseeb, directed the Railways Ministry to utilise its land properly to avoid losses. “We want to help out the railways, which is sinking,” the legislators observed. They asked senior officials to brief the committee in the next meeting on the recruitments recently made by the Pakistan Railways (PR).

The committee was surprised over the PR’s arbitrary decisions to dismantle several narrow tracks, such as the ones from Mandra to Bhon and Marri Indus to Bunnu, instead of making
them broader.

Hurdle: The committee observed that transport mafia was the biggest hurdle in making the PR a profitable entity and a service-oriented organisation. The committee urged the ministry to approach provinces through the Council of Common Interest (CCI) for recovering the PR’s land. They also asked the Railways to settle the matter under the new lease distribution formula of 60:40 under which the Railways would take 60 percent of the proceeds from the lease while the remaining would go to the respective province where the land is located. Senior Railways officials said there had to be a legal and constitutional cover for this arrangement, absence of which was presently complicating things for the railways. The meeting was attended by senators Dr Khatu Mal, Farah Aqil, Dr Abdul Khaliq Pirzada, Abdur Rashid, Pervaiz Rashid, Prof Muhammad Ibrahim Khan and Syed Javed Ali Shah and senior officials of the ministry.

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