THE anti-encroachment drive has been in full swing in the Valley over the last few weeks. The government is retrieving land occupied by people. The Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha has reassured that only the big land grabbers will be targeted and that the poor people will not be harassed. However, the drive has run up against opposition from the political parties, who have accused the government of trying evict all occupiers of the government land. On Monday, top Valley leaders such as Omer Abdullah, Mehboba Mufti and Sajad Lone held a press conference urging the government to limit the drive only to well-heeled people who have grabbed more land. They alleged that on ground, the government machinery was retrieving land from poor people.
Abdullah asked the administration to issue notices to encroachers and give them chance to produce documents before moving to evict them. Mufti held her press conference at the Delhi Press Club. She said evictions had turned Kashmir into “Afghanistan”. A day after Mufti held a protest in Delhi prompting Delhi Police to detain her. Lone said that empathy and not bulldozer should represent New Delhi in Kashmir.
The administration in its defense is saying that by retrieving government land it is only doing its job. The land being retrieved is the Roshni land, which was earlier handed by the previous governments to its occupiers under a scheme. The scheme, which was meant to raise Rs 25000 crore to finance buying of hydropower projects by selling state land under unauthorized occupation turned out to be a damp squib. It has fetched only a few hundred crore rupees since it was enacted in 2002 which makes the revenue earned from the land disproportionately less than the target.
Roshni scheme was enacted by the then National Conference government. However, it was amended by the PDP-Congress led coalition government in 2004 and 2007. In 2006, the Government had estimated that the total state land was 1,25,03,973 kanal, of which 20,64,972 kanal was under encroachment. The encroached land was valued at Rs 25,448 crore. Though on paper, the scheme looked fantastic, it turned out a massive disappointment. Once again, the culprit was the ineffective and the corrupt implementation. A part of the reason was that many of the scheme’s senior functionaries were themselves its beneficiaries including the rich businessmen and prominent civil society figures. But there were thousands of poor people who have occupied less than a kanal of land to build their houses. The administration certainly should show empathy towards them. Just imagine the goodwill it will generate.
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