Governing Islamabad

ISLAMABAD exists in something of a legal vacuum. Authority over the capital is split among several bodies, none answerable to its residents. First, there is an appointed chief commissioner with provincial-style powers under a presidential order from 1980. Second, there is a dormant metropolitan corporation. Third, and most visible in the life of the city, there is the Capital Development Authority, which plans, develops, zones, acquires and often demolishes, at will. Functions that elsewhere sit with several bodies gather here, answering upward to the federation and sideways to no one. This is the backdrop in which the new ICT Governance Model has been put forward for consultation.

Consider how Lahore is run. While the Lahore Development Authority is no model of probity, it cannot escape an elected layer above it. Its governing body is chaired by the chief minister and includes members of the Punjab Assembly and the city’s mayor. A provincial minister directly answers for its work. The discipline is imperfect, often ignored, but it exists. In Islamabad there is no equivalent design. The capital elects three members to the National Assembly, a body occupied with national business. No local government has sat since 2021. So when a sector floods or an enforcement squad arrives at dawn, no elected official’s survival depends on answering for it. The complaint travels up to the bureaucracy, never across to anyone the residents chose. Into that vacuum the CDA has expanded as the capital’s main governance authority in all but name.

This is not the first attempt at reform. The 2015 Local Government Act created a metropolitan corporation but was denied the functions that mattered. By contrast, this proposal envisages a more substantial change.

It creates a 27-member ‘Islamabad Capital Territory Assembly’ with its own chief executive and provincial autonomy. Health, education and municipal services would pass to it. For the first time, Islamabad would have an empowered government its residents could vote out. This is significant reform and should be acknowledged before any criticism.

A new proposal denies Islamabad control of its own planning.

But notice what the proposal keeps with the federation: law and order and master planning. The first is defensible on capital-status grounds. The second is where the argument should concentrate, for planning is the function that produces the contradictions residents live with.

Take the Margalla rezoning the CDA board approved in principle this month. Under the 1992 zoning regulations, just over 50,000 acres of land sits in Zone-III, a reserved area where private development is largely restricted. Yet thousands of acres within Zone-III were already privately owned prior to the 1992 zoning, when their use was suddenly restricted. Despite the new restrictions, the land has been bought, sold and taxed on each transaction like any other private property since 1992. In practice, construction also carried on. Now, part of Zone III suddenly becomes Zone-1A, and the indication is the authority will acquire and develop what it can while the rest is frozen. As a result, owners of the frozen land are left unable to build or sell on land originally taxed as private, without a single rupee of compensation.

This is one example among many of the contradictions that follow when planning is left to the CDA alone. The failure is not that of the people who run the authority. The CDA is staffed by capable officers who understand the technical work as well as anyone. The defect is structural: an unelected body is asked to make decisions that are political in nat­u­­re, weighing one resident against another, without the continuity, stability or legitimacy such choic­­es re­­quire. Its offic­ers car­­-ry, and defend, what elected representatives ought to own. The chain of approval runs from the CDA board to the federal cabinet, and at no point does an elected representative of Islamabad sit in it to share the burden.

The comparison offered in defence of keeping planning with the federal government does not hold up well. Washington, the most federally constrained capital in the democratic world, lets its elected council and mayor control the local elements of the city’s plan, and the fight there is to reclaim the powers it lacks; Canberra runs its own planning entirely. The pattern abroad is to devolve land use to elected local government and ring-fence only narrow federal interests. The ICT proposal inverts it, devolving visible services while keeping the function that shapes the city.

An assembly that may legislate on clinics and schools but not on how its own city is zoned is denied its most consequential portfolio. Under the proposal, Islamabad would at last have a government, but it would still not hold the map.

The writer is a barrister and entrepreneur.

Published in Dawn, June 29th, 2026

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