Akhter Hameed Khan and the OPP

The Orangi Pilot Project (OPP) was established in 1980 by Akhtar Hameed Khan with support from the then BCCI Foundation. The Project has attracted international attention and acclaim since it overcomes the major financial, technical and social problems related to the upgrading of low income settlements and places community involvement at the centre of the upgrading process. In addition, the principles developed by the Project have also been applied to city level related infrastructure design and implementation and have reduced costs to a fraction of conventionally designed and implemented systems.

A lot has been written on the OPP, not only by the OPP staff and Akhtar Hameed Khan himself but also by researchers, academics and development activists belonging to NGOs, government department and international agencies. However, these writings miss out on a number of important matters. For instance, they.do not explain the close relationship between the organisational culture of the OPP and Akhtar Hameed Khan’s personality, upbringing and lifelong search for truth. Nor do they clearly spell out the thinking behind the methodology of the Project (although many of them discuss it); the process of the development of human resources that has made it possible for the Project to expand into many urban areas of Pakistan; or the influence that the Project has had on the thinking of NGOs and CBOs in Pakistan and abroad and on bilateral and multilateral aid agencies. Nor do they look into the future of the OPP or examine the current directions the Project has opted for.

This small book is an attempt to fill some of these gaps. It has been written by Architect Arif Hasan who has been the Principal Consultant to the OPP since 1982 and has worked closely with Dr. Akhtar Hameed Khan.

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