Lahore: Housing schemes are being built rapidly in the city, most of them are housing schemes where there are no cemeteries to bury the dead. Citizens buy plots in such housing societies and build houses at cheap prices, but when a loved one dies, they have to face difficulties for their burial.
Bilal Ahmad is a resident of a private housing society near Canal Road Manawan. Recently, he and his family faced trouble when his father died and the local people in the nearby cemetery refused to allow him to bury the body.
Bilal Ahmed said that he was already in shock due to the sudden death of his father while he was not getting permission to bury his father’s dead body in the nearby graveyard. The local people said that they themselves bought the land and dedicated it for the cemetery. They should talk to the management of the housing society about where to bury the deceased. According to Bilal Ahmed, they had to wait for several hours and finally the local people gave permission for the burial.
People living in unregistered housing schemes like Bilal Ahmed often face a similar situation. Where there are cemeteries built on government land near the housing schemes, there is no problem of burial, but where the local people have bought and dedicated land for the cemetery, they have not allowed the burial of dead bodies from outsiders. goes
Rashid Karamat Butt, a former chairman of a local rural union council in Lahore, says that there are two cemeteries in his area, one is shared by the communities living in the village, while the other is on a government site, where any dead body is allowed to be buried. Is.
According to the 2021 report of Lahore Development Authority, 367 housing schemes in Lahore Division were declared legal while 236 were declared illegal. The list of all these housing societies is available on the official website of LDA. While the housing schemes declared illegal violated several other bylaws, these societies did not even allocate space for graveyards as per the law. Surprisingly, even in some of the declared housing schemes, there is no space for a graveyard even though they have shown the space allotted for a graveyard in the maps submitted to the LDA.
Mian Habibur Rahman, a well-known builder and developer of Lahore, while talking to Express Tribune, said that there is a network of housing societies in the city, these people are cheating the public. These are not approved by LDA or Metropolitan Corporation. They tell people about the cemetery in self-made maps or the cemetery of a nearby area is told as the cemetery of the society.
He said that since plots in these societies are cheap and often sold in installments, society owners do not leave space for parks, schools, graveyards, etc. He said that it is the duty of citizens to confirm all these matters before buying a plot.
On the other hand, the spokesperson of Lahore Development Authority (LDA) says that according to the rules of LDA and TMA, it is mandatory for a society to be built on an area of 100 kanals and more, that it has two of the total area. The percentage will be allocated for the cemetery. There is no requirement to allocate an area for a cemetery for a society built on an area of less than 100 kanals. Housing schemes without graveyards are not approved by LDA and TMA. All these are illegal housing schemes.