While Islamabad Auctions Prime Land for Profit, Thousands of Its Poorest Residents Fight to Keep a Roof Over Their Heads

Later this week, bidders will gather at the Jinnah Convention Centre in Islamabad for a three-day sale of commercial plots, shops, and petrol station sites across the capital. The Capital Development Authority (CDA) is offering discounts of up to 10 percent to buyers who pay quickly in US dollars, as reported by Dawn News. It is, by design, an event built to attract investors with deep pockets, and property listings are already circulating on real estate platforms such as milkiyat.com.

A few kilometers away, in settlements the CDA officially classifies as illegal encroachments, tens of thousands of people are waiting to find out whether their homes will still be standing by the end of the year.

The contrast is not new, but it has sharpened in recent months. As Islamabad's authority markets its most valuable real estate to the highest bidder, rights groups say it has simultaneously stepped up demolitions of the informal settlements, known as katchi abadis, where the city's low-income workers, laborers, and domestic staff have lived for decades. The two processes are, in the view of housing rights campaigners, two sides of the same coin: a capital that has never built a serious plan for affordable housing, even as it profits handsomely from the land it controls.

A City Built Without Room for the Poor

Islamabad was designed from scratch in the 1960s as a planned capital, with a master plan that, in theory, reserved space for housing across all income levels. In practice, formal low-cost housing never materialized at any meaningful scale. Research from the University of Essex has argued that the capital's property system has favored state officials and commercial developers, effectively shutting out working-class families from the formal housing market. Left with no legal way to settle in the city they built, generations of workers instead put up homes on vacant or marginal land, forming the katchi abadis that now house close to half a million people, according to figures cited repeatedly by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) and allied rights groups.

The CDA has, by its own record, launched only one low-income housing scheme since the year 2000: a rural project at Alipur Farash that has resettled a few hundred households. Set against a katchi abadi population estimated at roughly 500,000, rights groups describe the gap as proof of decades of institutional neglect.

The irony, campaigners argue, is that these settlements were never meant to be permanent, nor were they built out of defiance of the law. They emerged precisely because the formal system offered no alternative. Domestic workers, drivers, construction laborers, street vendors, and low-paid government staff have, for half a century, kept Islamabad running while being denied any legal path to live within it affordably. The katchi abadis are, in that sense, a workaround born of necessity rather than an act of encroachment, though the CDA has historically used the language of illegal occupation to describe them. For readers interested in exploring Pakistan's real estate landscape further, platforms like milkiyat.com provide comprehensive data and verification tools that highlight the vast disparities in property access across the country. More insights into the Islamabad property market can be found on Milkiyat.

Demolitions, Court Orders, and a Widening Dispute

In 2015, the Supreme Court of Pakistan issued a stay order against summary evictions of katchi abadis in Islamabad, intended to protect residents until a proper regularization and resettlement policy was in place, as reported by Pakistan Today. A 2016 court directive went further, ordering the CDA to draft a low-income housing plan for slum residents. That case remains unresolved.

Despite the stay, rights organizations say demolition drives have continued and, at times, intensified. A coalition that includes the HRCP, the All-Pakistan Alliance for Katchi Abadis, the National Commission for Justice and Peace, and the Awami Workers Party has said that enforcement action in Islamabad has already displaced roughly 50,000 people, hitting settlements from Allama Iqbal Colony to Dhobi Ghat, as well as older, historic villages such as Saidpur, Malpur, and Nurpur Shahan. CDA officials have pushed back on the framing, maintaining that current enforcement targets only illegal new construction, not settled communities.

That dispute over facts on the ground is itself part of the problem, according to housing researchers, who note that Islamabad remains the only major city in Pakistan without a clear legal framework for recognizing informal settlements—the kind of regularization process recommended internationally as the default response to informal housing, with resettlement treated as a last resort rather than a first option.

What International Standards Require

Pakistan is a party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which recognizes the right to adequate housing under Article 11. The UN Committee overseeing that treaty has stated, in its General Comment No. 7, that forced evictions are incompatible with the Covenant, and that any limitation on the right to housing must be grounded in law and aimed genuinely at the general welfare. Evictions frequently endanger other protected rights too, including the right to life with dignity.

Separate UN Basic Principles on Development-Based Evictions, adopted in 2007, require authorities to consult affected residents beforehand, explore every alternative, and treat resettlement as a last resort rather than a routine planning tool. Pakistani courts have partly absorbed these standards, reading a right to shelter into the constitutional right to life, and comparative research places Pakistan among a group of countries, alongside India, Bangladesh, and Nepal, that treat housing as a constitutional principle. Islamabad's katchi abadi litigation is, in effect, a years-long test of whether those principles hold in practice.

Minorities and the Displaced Twice Over

The human cost of this uncertainty falls unevenly. Colonies such as Rimsha, home to an estimated 25,000 residents who are predominantly Christian, illustrate how the housing crisis intersects with the position of religious minorities in the capital. Many families there were resettled in the early 2010s after being displaced a first time, following false blasphemy accusations against a Christian teenager and the security threats that followed for the wider community, a case widely reported by outlets like NPR. For residents facing a second displacement, the practical question is stark: without a guaranteed alternative, where does a community of tens of thousands go next? Recent reports from Christian Daily highlight the ongoing eviction threats.

Street vendors, another group with no secure legal footing in the city, describe similar treatment, with advocacy groups reporting that carts and goods are regularly confiscated during enforcement drives, and small-scale traders detained over minor infractions.

For families in these settlements, the uncertainty shapes everyday decisions, from school enrollment to whether it is worth repairing a leaking roof. Residents interviewed by local outlets describe the strain of not knowing whether the coming months will bring a demolition notice, making it hard to plan any future for their children. Elders in some of the older katchi abadis, including villages that predate the city itself, note that their communities existed before the capital was built around them, only to be reclassified as illegal once formal zoning arrived decades later. Rights workers add that women often bear a disproportionate share of the burden, typically left to manage the household during and after demolitions.

A Question of Fairness

What has drawn particular criticism from rights advocates is the sense of double standards. Campaigners have pointed to cases in which private clubs and gated housing schemes with disputed legal status have continued to operate largely undisturbed, and to episodes where political intervention was used to halt action against upmarket residential developments—while no equivalent intervention has been extended to katchi abadis or older villages facing demolition. For critics, the commercial auction now taking place at the Jinnah Convention Centre reinforces that perception: an authority well organized when it comes to generating revenue from land, but far slower to act on its own legal obligation to house the people whose labor keeps the capital running.

The CDA operates under its founding 1960 ordinance, which rights groups say includes provisions anticipating the need to regularize informal settlements—a legal basis, they argue, that has simply gone unused.

Government officials generally frame demolition drives as law enforcement rather than housing policy, arguing that unregulated construction poses safety risks and obstructs planned infrastructure. Urban planners note that informal construction on land earmarked for roads or drainage can create genuine hazards, particularly during flooding, and that some enforcement is a legitimate function of any city authority. The disagreement, then, is less about whether the CDA has a right to regulate land use, and more about whether it has met its parallel duty to offer a lawful, affordable alternative before removing people from the only housing available to them. Understanding the legal distinctions between formal and informal settlements is often the first step, a concept explored extensively on platforms like milkiyat.com that track property data and verification across the country. For more on property verification in Pakistan, visit Milkiyat's insights section.

What Comes Next

None of this makes commercial development itself the problem. Cities need functioning land markets, and auction revenue can, in principle, fund public services, including housing. The concern raised by rights groups is one of balance: whether a capital able to organize a polished, multi-day auction with currency-based discounts for investors can show the same institutional capacity when it comes to surveying its informal settlements and building the low-cost housing its own master plans have long promised.

For now, the katchi abadis of Islamabad remain in the position they have occupied for over a decade: protected on paper by a Supreme Court stay order, but without a resolved legal status, a completed survey, or a credible resettlement plan. Whether that changes may depend less on court proceedings than on whether the capital's development priorities start to include the people who have the least power to shape them.