The sea trees are best seen from space — for only the satellite’s eye can do justice to their fields of emerald (viridian) green florets. At eye level, that is, from an earthly vantage point, however, the mangroves of Hawkesbay look like a sleight of nature’s hand: for how do these overloaded prickly bushes sit on the water? Their secret is to stand on spindly legs cleverly concealed beneath its surface.
It’s not cool to admit it, but it’s notoriously difficult to summon the emotional energy to care about Karachi’s mangroves. Or read yet another article about them disappearing. They just keep disappearing. That’s all we read about them, or how they were once home to creepy crawlies we’re also supposed to care about, or eat.
The misfortune of this protected mangrove forest is that it is located miles away from the shacks and mansions of the city, perched at the rim of the Arabian Sea, where the breeze is cool and tangy with a lick of salt. As one of the last few places in Karachi untouched by concrete, this mangrove-filled lagoon is at risk, rendered vulnerable by its sheer size, an eye-watering 650 acres, and tragically so, by the promise it offers: space to build on.
Shiraz and the other Baloch men were watching, standing 10 steps afar, when the wall started to go up around the periphery of the lagoon about two years ago. It was erected by driving H-column stakes into the ground eight feet apart and slotting precast concrete slabs between them. It is the cheapest, quickest way to cordon off an area.
The wall was erected by driving H-column stakes into the ground eight feet apart and slotting precast concrete slabs between them. — Photo by authorShiraz and the men who live in Haji Ahmed Goth work as caretakers for the Hawkesbay huts, which line the sand bar that separates the sea from the lagoon at the back where the mangroves live. These men had a feeling about what was going to come next. And, indeed, when the dumper trucks loaded with sand began to rumble in each day, 10 at a time, and leave nimbler and lighter by the time the sun went down, their suspicions were confirmed.
An environmental group had also been watching. Their access to the tidal mudflats and the mangroves in the lagoon had been shrinking for some time now, and this boundary wall was just a sign that more of it would disappear. However, they were too fearful of the ‘political’ influence on the land construction activity to speak up about it.
Satellite images show how the land has changed over the years. — DawnGISSatellite imagery from 2008 onwards provides incontrovertible proof that the mangrove-rich Hawkesbay backwaters have been deliberately ‘filled’ to turn them into ‘land’ for housing schemes. This barely perceptible metamorphosis was partly engineered by a method called sand trapping (see box).
The encroachers started building thin tracks in the water which act as traps because they don’t let sand exit after being flushed into the lagoon by the sea during high tide. As the left-behind sand sediments, the lagoon’s bed level slowly rose over time. Then all they needed to do was supplement this ‘reclamation’ with a little extra external padding.
“First they built a street and then they filled the land with sand from huge dumper trucks,” said a local, too fearful to give his name. Three men have already been killed fighting for the forest.
Clearly, the people behind this land reclamation would like to protect their handiwork. This is why the boundary wall started to go up in 2022 around the lagoon’s edges. But who in their right mind would buy a waterbody like this backwater and go to all the trouble to alter sea flow patterns and dump tons of sand?
Only someone who understood the value of real estate in Karachi.
To uncover the mystery, Dawn.com visited the land enclosed by a boundary wall and inquired with the security personnel present about the landowners and the project. “It belongs to Haji Adam Jokhio,” said one security guard summarily. He would not volunteer any more information.
Over the next few months, Dawn.com made several attempts to contact Jokhio for comment. The first such attempt was made on October 6, 2023, through his lawyer, Zia ul Haq Makhdoom, who declined to answer any questions or facilitate a connection. Following this, a reporter visited the site and asked the on-ground security to connect them to the owners. The security head got in touch on October 29, 2023, and promised to arrange a meeting with Jokhio. Despite several follow-ups, no meeting materialised.
During the course of this investigation it was revealed in official documents — such as the Record of Rights, letters issued by the Land Utilisation Department (LU) of Government of Sindh (GOS), property register for the city of Karachi, possession orders and payment challans issued by LU GOS — the owners of this land were “Usman son of Sadiq and others” and “Ari son of Haji Mehran and others” while Haji Adam Jokhio only had power of attorney of this land. Dawn.com made several attempts to trace both these parties, but in vain.
In July 2024, Dawn.com reached out to lawyer Haseeb Jamali, who is now overseeing the case Jokhio filed against the Sindh government over regularisation of the land being discussed in this piece; he said he could only share the facts of that particular case.
Dawn.com also reached out to the Land Administration & Revenue Management Information System (LARMIS), the department responsible for the digitisation of land........