Parween Rahman

Parween Rahman, whose name is also commonly spelled Perween Rehman, was born on 22 January 1957 in Dhaka, then the capital of East Pakistan and today the capital of Bangladesh ^[1]. She grew up in a middle-class, educated household as one of four children. Her early years in Dhaka ended abruptly with the war of 1971, when East Pakistan became the independent state of Bangladesh. The family lost its home and belongings in the upheaval and migrated to Karachi, in what remained of Pakistan, to start over with very little ^[2].

That experience of displacement shaped her outlook for the rest of her life. Her sister, the writer Aquila Ismail, later recalled that Parween understood from childhood what it meant to arrive in a strange city without property, papers, or connections ^[2]. Karachi in the 1970s was absorbing wave after wave of migrants, and the family settled into the crowded, improvised life of a metropolis that was growing faster than its services.

Rahman studied architecture at the Dawood College of Engineering and Technology in Karachi, graduating in the early 1980s ^[1]. She later completed postgraduate training in housing, building, and urban planning at the Institute of Housing Studies in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, which gave her formal grounding in the economics and politics of low-income settlements ^[3].

After a brief spell at a private architectural firm, Rahman made a decision in 1983 that defined the rest of her career: she joined the Orangi Pilot Project, known as OPP, founded three years earlier by the celebrated development thinker Akhtar Hameed Khan ^[1]. Orangi Town, spread across the hills of northwest Karachi, was home to well over a million people living in katchi abadis, unplanned settlements without secure title, sewers, or reliable water. Khan's idea was radical in its simplicity: rather than waiting for the state or foreign donors, residents could finance and build their own neighbourhood infrastructure if given technical guidance ^[4].

Rahman became joint director of OPP in 1983, and when the organisation was split into separate institutions in 1988 she took charge of the OPP Research and Training Institute, usually shortened to OPP-RTI, a post she held until her death ^[3]. Colleagues remembered a manager who avoided publicity, paid herself a modest salary, and preferred sitting on the floor of community meetings to appearing at conferences ^[2].

Under her direction, the institute refined what became known as the component-sharing model. Households and lanes paid for and laid their own underground sewerage lines, while the institute mapped the settlements, trained local plumbers and masons, and pressed government agencies to build the trunk sewers and treatment works that only the state could provide ^[4]. By the time of her death, residents of Orangi had financed sanitation for tens of thousands of households at a fraction of the cost of conventional donor-funded schemes, a result documented by the architect and researcher Arif Hasan, her long-time collaborator ^[4].

Any account of Parween Rahman achievements has to begin with sanitation, but her work reached much further. The low-cost sewerage methods developed in Orangi were replicated, with OPP-RTI support, in dozens of other towns and cities across Pakistan and studied by planners in other countries of Asia and Africa ^[4]. The model influenced national policy debates in Pakistan about how katchi abadis should be regularised and serviced, and it was cited internationally as evidence that poor communities are investors in their own cities rather than passive recipients of aid ^[3].

Her second great contribution was documentation. Rahman and her young team of para-professionals, many of them recruited and trained from Orangi itself, mapped hundreds of informal settlements and villages, known as goths, on the periphery of Karachi ^[5]. These maps recorded who lived where, what land they occupied, and how water actually reached, or failed to reach, their homes. In a city where land records were opaque and contested, this quiet cartography was explosive. Her research documented how huge volumes of water were being siphoned from Karachi's public supply and sold through illegal hydrants, and how village common lands were being seized, subdivided, and sold by politically protected operators ^[5].

She also worked on securing legal title for villagers. The mapping carried out by OPP-RTI and its partner, the Sindh Katchi Abadis Authority process, helped thousands of families in goths around Karachi obtain ownership documents, protecting them from eviction by developers ^[5]. Alongside this she directed the Orangi Charitable Trust's microcredit programme and supported low-cost housing research, teacher training, and youth education initiatives in the settlement ^[3]. In recognition of her service, the government of Pakistan posthumously awarded her the Sitara-i-Shujaat, the Star of Bravery ^[6].

Rahman never married and lived simply in Karachi, close to her mother and siblings ^[2]. People who knew her described a woman of unusual warmth who laughed easily, wrote poetry, and kept her office open to residents of Orangi at all hours. She disliked being called an activist, preferring to describe herself as a teacher and researcher, and she routinely deflected credit toward the community organisations she supported ^[2].

She was aware of the risks her work carried. Friends and colleagues later recounted that she had received threats connected to her documentation of water theft and land seizures, and that armed men had come looking for her at her office more than once in the years before her death ^[5]. She refused suggestions to leave Orangi or to hire armed guards, arguing that her safety lay in the trust of the people she worked among ^[2].

Her sister Aquila Ismail preserved much of this personal history in a book-length biography, and the Karachi filmmaker Mahera Omar recorded interviews with her that later formed the core of a documentary film about her life ^[2].

On the evening of 13 March 2013, gunmen on a motorcycle opened fire on Rahman's car near Banaras flyover in Karachi as she was driving home from her office in Orangi. She was shot and died shortly afterwards in hospital, at the age of 56 ^[1]. The killing drew condemnation across Pakistan and abroad, with obituaries in international newspapers describing her as one of the country's most respected urban planners and a defender of the poor ^[1].

The investigation that followed became a story in itself. Police initially blamed a Taliban commander who was reported killed in an encounter days later, an account her family and colleagues never accepted ^[7]. Her sister petitioned the Supreme Court of Pakistan, which ordered a fresh investigation, and a joint investigation team eventually connected the murder to interests threatened by her land documentation work ^[7].

In December 2021, almost nine years after the shooting, an anti-terrorism court in Karachi convicted five men over her murder, sentencing them to life imprisonment ^[7]. Human rights organisations welcomed the verdict while noting that questions remained about who had ordered the killing. In 2022 an appellate court acquitted the convicted men, a reversal that her family challenged, and the case continued to move through Pakistan's courts, keeping her name in the national conversation about impunity and the protection of activists ^[7].

For anyone asking who was Parween Rahman, the shortest honest answer is that she proved a slum could plan itself. The Orangi Pilot Project Research and Training Institute continued its work after 2013 under colleagues she had trained, and the maps, surveys, and archives she built remain a primary record of how Karachi's informal settlements actually function ^[4]. Researchers on urban poverty routinely draw on OPP-RTI data, and the component-sharing sanitation model she championed still shapes debates on financing infrastructure in fast-growing cities ^[4].

Her story reached wider audiences through Mahera Omar's 2016 documentary, Perween Rahman: The Rebel Optimist, and through Aquila Ismail's biography of her sister ^[2]. Universities and civic groups in Pakistan hold annual lectures in her memory, and her killing is frequently cited in reporting on the dangers faced by land rights defenders in South Asia ^[6].

Among the most repeated Parween Rahman facts is one she stated herself in recorded interviews: that the poor of Orangi had invested more of their own money in their homes and lanes than any government scheme ever had. Any serious Parween Rahman biography returns to that conviction, that the residents of informal settlements are citizens with knowledge and capital of their own. It remains her most durable argument, carried on in the settlements she mapped and the students, surveyors, and community organisers she trained ^[3].