Published on: 21/03/2013
OPP-RTI Director Perveen Rahman. Photo: NPR / Dawn
The internationally acclaimed and widely replicated project that she led, succeeded in bringing low-cost sanitation to Karachi's Orangi squatter community of 1 million people.
Ms Rahman's associates believe her death was linked to her work on exposing Karachi's land grabbing and water mafia. The police suspect Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militants of being behind the killing. The Express Tribune reports that Ms Rahman had also worked in a Taliban-controlled area in Karachi.
A professional architect and alumnus of the Institute of Housing Studies in Rotterdam, she was recruited by Akhter Hameed Khan to become Joint Director of the Orangi Pilot Project in 1983, where she managed the housing and sanitation programmes.
After the OPP was split in four organisations, in 1988, Ms Rahman became director of OPP-RTI. She tells about her work in a 2009 video interview. In 1989, she founded the NGO Urban Resource Centre in Karachi.
Ms. Rahman, who was 56, is survived by her mother, two brothers and a sister.
Source: Sanitation Updates, 16 Mar 2013
