ISLAMABAD: New chairman of the Capital Development Authority (CDA) retired Capt Noorul Amin Mengal on Wednesday took charge of the civic agency and made his presence felt by visiting the under construction Bhara Kahu bypass.

An officer of Pakistan Administrative Service (PAS) in BS 20, Mr Mengal replaced retired Capt Mohammad Usman. Like his predecessors, Mr Mengal has been appointed as Chief Commissioner and tasked to look after the civic agency`s affairs as well.

Mr Usman served in CDA just five months and during his stay he besides focusing on ongoing projects,launchedBharaKahubypass, which has two components, one is 4-km-long road and the other over one-km-long flyover.

The road portion is now heading towards completion and work is in progress on flyover portion also.

He had also started new road from sector D-12 to E-11 to connect the Margalla Road with other parts of the city.

He along with his team madegood homework to make the ongoingplots auction a success.

During the last five years, the CDA launched a large number of development projects, particularly during the tenure of Amir Ali Ahmed such as Margalla Road, IJP Road, Expressway, Rawal Dam, 7th Avenue Interchange, G-7 underpass, development of three sectors, etc., were started. Most of the road projects have been completed and now Margalla Road and IJP are near completion.

New chairman will have to pay special attention to completion of development work of sector I-12, I-15 and E-12 and C-15. Except for I-15, the development work in all other sectors has been slow.

Similarly, a parking plaza in Blue Area, which was started in March last year and supposed to be completed by this March, has been making progress at a very slow pace.

There is a need to focus on civic issues such as rusting water pipelines while in the city`s old sector such as G-6 and G-7 people are facing drainage and sewage line issues.

The residents of Islamabad are looking towards new Chairman to resolve their several basic issues such as ensuring water supply, removing encroachment, ensuring parking facilities, setting up dumping site at appropriate place, clearing compensation issues of landholders,keepingaregulatorycheck on mushroom growth of unauthor-ised construction, etc.

CDA officials told Dawn that these are chronic issues, which needed attention of the new chairman and the government.

They, however, said that for resolving such issues, the CDA chief should be given appropriate time. The officials said that short stay can`t resolve issues as the governments always push the civic agency`s head to focus on visible projects(such asroad andbridges).

They said that Ghazi Brotha Project, which was conceived back in 2008 to bring 200 million gallon per day to Rawalpindi and Islamabad, could not be properly started.

Islamabad has been facing fast growth of population and it has around three million population (as a large number of people of Murree, AJK and Galyat) stay in the city for few months during winter, but it has only up to 70mgd water supply. During the last over two decades no new sources of water was explored that resulted in scarcity of the commodity.

Meanwhile, the shrinking space of parking and encroachments in markets, also seek attention of the new city manager.

The authority has also failed to develop new sectors, with areas such as D-13, E-13, F-13, C-13, C-14 and C-16 awaiting for anyone who could resolve issues of landowners and kick start development work over there.