Parveen Rehman was a Karachi-based Architect, born in Dhaka in 1957. She did part of her schooling in the former East Pakistan and migrated to Karachi after the fall of Dhaka.
She joined Orangi Pilot Project (OPP) in 1982 as a joint director. Before this, she worked in a private architecture firm. OPP’s original aim was to build an affordable sanitation and sewage treatment system in the squatter community of Orangi Town at the outskirts of Karachi. She became director of the Research and Training Institute (OPP-RTI) in 1988 when the OPP was split into four organisations.
The central problem that the Project sought to solve was that Orangi Town was an ‘unofficial’ settlement and thus did not qualify for government aid. Ultimately, the OPP successfully demonstrated that a complex development project can be executed by mobilising community buy-in. To the land mafia, Orangi Town represented an opportunity for profit. Orangi Town’s status as an unofficial settlement meant that many of its residents did not formally own their homes. The land mafia took advantage of this to buy the land that the settlements were built on from the local government for a cheap price and then evict residents before clearing the land to make way for new construction projects.
Parveen Rehman started getting deaths threats from the aforementioned land mafia which eventually led to her murder by one of them as eye witnesses testified.
Her supposed sin was to document everything about the lands that had been grabbed. Another sin of her was to help those whose lands had been grabbed. Yet, she never hesitated to go to the area where her life was constantly under threat.
Pakistan and especially Karachi lost a gem and a courageous woman due to the rampant land grabbing culture. We would have had her if the state and the government provided security to her or handled the land mafia’s belligerence earnestly
