Had such a system existed in Murree, 453 approvals would have been 453 public, auditable records, not 453 private favours.

The hills of Murree will not grow back in my lifetime.

They will be saved when the power to say yes or no to a building is taken from the quiet back room and handed to a system everyone can inspect.

I was born in Murree, where pine forests once held the mist like a secret and the Mall Road smelled of woodsmoke and rain. The last time I went home, I stood on a ridge I had climbed as a boy and could not find the hill. Concrete had swallowed it.

The change began in 2001, when the Nazim system arrived with promises of power to the people. In Murree, power went to a few hands and the hills paid for it. Residents, myself included, hold the tehsil nazim of that era, Khurshid Abbasi, responsible for approving more than 453 multi-storey buildings on slopes that should never have carried them. Each building was a signature, and each signature was a small betrayal of a fragile mountain. Trees fell and drainage channels were choked. In the January 2022 snowstorm, hundreds of vehicles were stranded and 23 people froze to death in their cars, and the country asked how a tourist town had been allowed to become a trap. Those of us from Murree were not surprised. We had watched it being built, floor by illegal floor.

Murree is not an exception. It is a preview. Lahore tops the world’s pollution rankings each winter, its children coughing through smog that no one answers for. Karachi’s open spaces became plazas, its natural drains became real estate, and its residents buy water from tankers run by a mafia everyone can name and no one can touch. In Islamabad, a capital designed as a garden city, illegal housing societies keep eating into green belts and watersheds. The development authorities meant to guard these cities, the CDA, the LDA and the KDA, were created to protect the public’s interest in land. Too often they have become the market where that interest is sold. Master plans are rewritten after the fact, and “regularisation” is the polite word for........

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