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Peshawar Declares 27 Housing Schemes Illegal, Warns Property Buyers
By Mariam Khan
Real Estate Analyst
5 min read
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News
By Mariam Khan
Real Estate Analyst
5 min read
The Shah Alam tehsil administration in Peshawar has declared 27 housing and plotting schemes illegal, warning citizens against booking, investment, and land transactions in these schemes. The list includes City Residencia, New and Old Qurtaba Model Town, Doctors Colony, Khyber Town, and Overseas Colony, among other named schemes.
This declaration is not an isolated action, and its concentration in Shah Alam tehsil specifically fits a well documented, longstanding pattern. Among Peshawar's tehsils, Shah Alam has consistently carried by far the largest share of illegal housing societies identified by district authorities, with prior official counts placing well over 100 unauthorised schemes in Shah Alam alone, compared to considerably smaller numbers in City, Saddar, and Mattani tehsils. This concentration reflects Shah Alam's position as one of Peshawar's most actively developing peripheral areas, where demand for affordable housing has consistently outpaced the pace of formal, regulator approved scheme development.
The Peshawar Development Authority, formed in 1978 as successor to the earlier Greater Peshawar Metropolitan Authority established under the Urban Planning Act 1975, is the public benefit corporation responsible for construction and planned development across Peshawar, operating under an autonomous board chaired by the Chief Minister with a Director General serving as board secretary. With roughly 4,600 employees spread across 23 directorates, PDA's operational reach covers the wider Peshawar Division, including Peshawar, Charsadda, and Nowshera districts, and its own approved developments include large scale schemes such as Hayatabad and Regi Model Town. It is against this same authority's approval standards that the 27 schemes named in this declaration have been found wanting.
Peshawar's illegal housing society count has been documented and updated repeatedly over recent years, with earlier official tallies identifying more than 150 unauthorised schemes across the district as far back as 2020 and 2021, a number that further updates have shown continuing to grow through subsequent years. Several of the schemes named in this latest 27 scheme declaration, including variations of the Qurtaba Model Town name, have appeared on Peshawar's illegal scheme lists in earlier years as well, suggesting these specific developments have continued operating and, in some cases, continued marketing or selling plots despite having been flagged as unauthorised previously.
Schemes declared illegal under this kind of tehsil or district administration action are typically found to be operating without the No Objection Certificate required from PDA or the relevant Tehsil Municipal Administration before land can be legally subdivided and sold as residential plots. A common, recurring problem across Peshawar's illegal schemes generally has been failure to provide legally required facilities to residents, including greenbelts, playing areas, and land reserved for schools and mosques, obligations that formally approved schemes are required to meet but which unauthorised developments frequently skip entirely.
Anyone who has already purchased a file or made payments toward a plot in any of the 27 named schemes faces direct, serious regulatory risk. Land transfers, mutations, and registries in unregistered housing societies are typically barred until developers obtain a proper NOC, meaning existing file holders may find themselves unable to formally register or transfer their purchase even if they wish to sell, unless and until the specific scheme achieves regularisation, which is not guaranteed and may never occur for schemes built in fundamental violation of land use regulations.
Before making any payment, booking, or investment connected to any of the schemes named in this declaration, prospective buyers should directly verify the scheme's current NOC status with PDA or the relevant Tehsil Municipal Administration, rather than relying on a developer's or agent's claims of legitimacy. Given how many previously flagged Peshawar schemes have continued operating and marketing plots despite illegal designation in past years, buyers should treat a scheme's continued visible marketing or sales activity as no indication whatsoever of its actual legal status.
The scale and persistence of Peshawar's illegal housing society problem, now spanning multiple official declarations across several years with dozens of schemes named repeatedly, points to a structural gap between the pace of the city's peripheral residential development and the capacity of regulatory authorities to keep formal approval processes ahead of that growth. Buyers evaluating any Peshawar area housing scheme, not only those named in this specific declaration, should treat direct NOC verification with PDA as an essential, non negotiable step before any transaction, given how widespread and long running this specific regulatory gap has proven to be across the district.
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