ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (Daily Times), June 18, 2008:
By Imran Naeem Ahmad
His hair and beard having gone snowy white, 72-year-old Rahim Dad is among the first persons to benefit from Capital Development Authority’s (CDA) Saidpur Village Project.
This man who has lived all his life in the picturesque village has been allowed to set up a pottery shop by the authorities as part of their plans to make the project viable.
No wonder, Rahim is all praise for CDA. “President Ayub Khan made Islamabad and CDA Chairman Kamran Lashari has polished it up,” he said while arranging his clay ware on a small table just outside his shop.
As he looks towards the green Margalla Hills cuddling up the centuries old village in its lap, Rahim says that seven of their generations had lived there. “We are from this soil and deeply love it,” he remarks.
The weekly Sunday holiday draws good crowds to the village that means good business for Rahim. “The sale is often good then but I think that once the entire project is completed there would be many more people coming in,” he anticipated. The CDA did a soft opening of the village in April after marvellously re-doing an old Hindu temple that now serves as a photo museum while also creating shops and sprucing up the surrounding houses.
Project Director Shabbir Malik told Daily Times that the project had created job opportunities for the villagers and people like Rahim would continue to benefit in the days ahead. “This aspect is one of the key elements,” he said.
Among products up for sale at Rahim’s shop are pitchers, coin boxes, mugs and jugs and a host of display items, all made of clay. “We make them all here,” he said.
Extensive work is still on at the village with the focus being the art and craft bazaar just next to a stream that has now been thoroughly cleaned up. “We plan to have shops for paintings and dying arts,” Malik said.
Everything reflects the traditional ambience – the temple, the stones used on the walls, the stacks of hay, the horse-drawn carts and all else shows the essence of Potohar region.
The CDA also has plans to set up food courts complete with traditional and fast food variety besides establishing coffee shops.
Malik pointed out that it were facilities like the Saidpur Village that would attract tourists. “Making buildings of concrete are never an attraction for them but places like these would certainly draw them in,” he said.
However in developing what is now a truly tidy village, the CDA had to face stints of hiccups, this being a community-related project. An estimated 10,000 people live there and therefore there were problems of re-location and compensation that came up along the way.
But much of those problems have since been sorted out and with the arrival of both local and foreign tourists, the villagers are slowly beginning to realise that this project would benefit them all, once everything falls in place.
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