Land Encroachment Drive After SC Order

Supreme Court of India refused to pass any order on a circular of Jammu and Kashmir under which a drive has been launched to evict the land owned by Government including Roshni land. Justice M R Shah and Justice CT Ravikumar orally asked Jammu & Kashmir Government not to demolish any house. The learned judges of the top court of the Country didn’t passed any order which sends out a message that land grabbers will be dealt as per law and it explicitly and implicitly means that this land will be taken away from encroachers. “We are not passing any order today and will not grant a general stay”, the top court said. The government had issued a circular that encroachments on land of Kacharia and State land will be vacated. Revenue department which looks after the land records asked all the residents to either demolish or incur the cost of demolition. Many people have constructed either residential houses or commercial buildings on this land owned by Union territory. Poor people whose number will be in thousands have also constructed their houses on this land. Government many times decided these patches of land will be retrived from the encroachers but actions were not done practically on ground resulting more and more land got encroached especially plain patches. Land mafiyas and gunda raj urooj ko pohcha tha meaning land mafiyaism touched sky. Political system is also involved in it as many leaders and persons with long arms have grabbed this type of land far more than poor and downtrodden people encroached for residential purposes. It is a fact poor man has aash of sarkar after God. Poor people have encroached such lands in marlas utmost to two kanals while as big handed people have encroached big patches that too for commercial purposes and they have earned a lot from these patches.
Day before Lietuinant Governor Manoj Sinha made it clear that during encroachment drives residential houses of poor people will not be touched means poor people residing on such land need not to worry or get panicked. There is a provision that if any person has occupied a patch of government land without proper permission such a patch of land can be interchanged by a mutation known as exchange yanay Tabadallanama. In earlier times it was exchanged only through a mutation but now a days after proper registration deed it can be exchanged. Many people have exchanged such lands earlier. It means by this mutation one’s properiety land becomes the state land and vice versa. But here the Big Question is about those poor people who do not have propriety land and have constructed the residential house on it this provision is not for them. As now the Hon’ble top court has also advised not to demolish the residential houses, government must think about this burning issue related to these landless people. There number should accurately be counted and formal procedure and guidelines should be laid down as otherwise due to population expansion the time is not far away when the government will not be able to sort out the things and day will come when these two words Kacharia and State land will vanish from the revenue records.
(The author is incharge record room DC office Anantnag. The views, opinions, facts, assumptions, presumptions and conclusions expressed in this article are author’s own and aren’t necessarily in accord with the views of “Kashmir Horizon”.)
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