Ten Plots, One Empty Field: The File on Islamabad's Land Scandal

I generally read the newspaper from the back page first, hunting for the sports section. That morning was different. My eye caught a document on the front page. Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), Corporate Crime Circle, Islamabad. The allegation: the illegal allotment of ten residential plots in Sector I-12/4 of the capital. Each plot 30 × 60 feet. The accused: several former officials of the Capital Development Authority (CDA). The Express Tribune carried the report.

Ten plots — a small number on paper. But in the land market, that number carries no small weight. In Islamabad, an allotment is not merely a piece of property; it is a family's future, a child's school fee, a debt-free old age. When a state distributes land, it distributes fate. So when the arithmetic of land goes wrong, it is not merely an administrative slip — it is a moral debt, one that must one day be repaid with interest.

It is worth understanding what the CDA is. The body born in 2026 to build Islamabad as a planned capital is the Capital Development Authority. The city's land, housing, roads, parks, markets — the distribution and oversight of all of it sits in this institution's hands. When such vast power is gathered in one place, one question arises: how strong is the chain of internal control?

It is also worth knowing what the FIA's Corporate Crime Circle does. White-collar crime, fraud, forgery, internal financial misconduct within institutions — this unit investigates precisely these. The focus, in other words, is not on petty theft; it is on the process inside an institution. This case on ten plots stems from inquiry 35/2026. Investigation first, case later — that sequence tells you the matter is still at an early, evidence-gathering stage.

Why land is so political becomes clear once you go to Islamabad. There, a file is not just paper; the file behaves like currency. One signature can make a family middle-class, another can leave it a renter forever. In a city where land is this expensive, control over land is the greatest power of all. So corruption in land administration is not an ordinary financial scandal; it is rot sitting inside the distribution system of the state's most valuable asset.

I-12/4 is among Islamabad's relatively new residential sectors. Plots here are allotted under set rules — displaced families, government employees, applicants in specific quotas. Every step requires documents, certificates, and independent verification. And the integrity of whoever holds that verification is then the biggest infrastructure of all. For walls can build a house, but only integrity can build justice.

This is where the allegation centres. According to the investigators, the former officials created false claims, abused their authority, and secured a double rehabilitation benefit for the same person — and along that path the allotment of ten plots was completed. The phrase “double rehabilitation” is short, but a large gap hides inside it. Rehabilitation means giving a new address to a family that lost its home to war, disaster, or a development project. If one person receives the benefit twice, whose place did the second beneficiary take? Probably that of a family still searching for its own name on the list of empty plots.

The FIA says the roles of others — such as Yaser Shah — will also be examined. That is, the list may grow longer. When an investigation uses the word “others,” it usually means the search is not over. And the question may no longer be confined to ten plots; if the same documentary gap has been used in other sectors, the case is like a tip of ice — what lies beneath is larger than what is seen.

Now an uncomfortable thing must be said. In our region we are used to reading corruption news under headlines of “arrest” and “case filed.” But a case being registered and a crime being proven are not the same thing. The legal principle is clear: the accused is innocent until a court convicts. Yet the news cycle often writes the verdict before the trial. That haste costs twice. One, an innocent person may be stigmatised. Two, the real question gets buried.

And the real question is not inside the person — it is inside the process. We keep asking who stole, who was arrested, how many years the sentence was. But nobody asks: what weakness in the allotment-approval process made it possible to draw a benefit twice with the same document? False claims could be created, and no one caught them — who created that gap? If the process itself is flawed, then one person is caught today, and tomorrow another walks the very same path. A person can be caught; unless the gap is closed, it returns under a new name.

There is another layer to this case that never reaches a headline — the layer of waiting. In the corridors of some Islamabad office, people sit every day who have waited years for their own allotment letter. Their papers are in order, their quota is in order, yet the file does not move. Because where allotment depends on a recommendation, the family with no recommendation never sees its wait end. Every day of that wait is a small corruption — one that never appears in any case file.

And here is another reality. Land-corruption cases are often long, complex, and evidence-dependent. Witnesses come under threat, documents go missing, time drifts by, and the case slowly gathers dust on a shelf of files. So the true test of this case is not in the number of arrests; the true test is whether, five years from now, this document still stands in court.

Other cities of the world have faced this problem, and some have shown the way out. Hong Kong built its anti-corruption commission for exactly this reason — to catch the individual and, at the same time, to recast the process so that corruption ceases to be profitable. Singapore introduced transparent lists and number-based allocation in its public housing, where the rule outweighs the recommendation. The lesson is plain: punishment is needed, but more than punishment we need a design that does not create the opportunity. If Islamabad's case ends with a list of a few names while the process design stays unchanged, the system did not learn — it only grew afraid.

This case is a mirror for us too. In our own city, the same kind of gap works in the distribution of land, playing fields, markets. The only difference is that the gap does not always make a headline.

And this is where it touches me too — a man who has sat by the pitch for twenty-eight years writing about football. Because the match was never only the match. I have said many times that the state, the administration, the system that exists beyond the touchline is the same system. If a plot in Islamabad is allotted unlawfully today, then tomorrow, under the same kind of arrangement, some child's playing field in the city may become a commercial plot on paper. I learned my first lessons in writing in a newsroom; after the newsroom closed, I learned to write without the newsroom — and then I understood that a freelance columnist's only support is her own habit of verification. When an institution loses that habit, its loss is many times greater than mine.

So even though this story was not printed on the sports page, I am reading it with a sporting eye. A system that cannot keep its land accounts will not keep its field accounts either. Or, more precisely — an administration that fumbles the arithmetic of an empty plot sees the fate of a packed stadium as nothing more than a number.

The investigation will move forward. Perhaps more names will come, perhaps more plots will surface. But before I stop, let me leave one question — if these ten plots are returned, if the accused are punished, who will guarantee that tomorrow, in a new sector, in a new official's hands, the very same documentary gap will not be used again? The list of the accused changes; the design of the gap stays the same. The question is not for the investigators; it is for those who approved the design of the system.