Jammu Development Authority, an organization supposed to be the hub of urban development, has unfortunately turned into an orphan asking all and sundry to listen to its plaints. An organization that is supposed to see to the development of urban Jammu along modern lines and streamline all civic facilities seems to have become helpless in face of hurdles in its way. Establishing a development authority and making it functional depends on fulfilling the primary requirement of providing it with land. The woes of JDA start with this primary requirement. Way back in 1973, the Government, through a formal decision, sanctioned allotment of 77124 kanals and 5 marlas of state Nazool land to JDA. Formal transferring and handing over into the possession of the JDA was the work of the Revenue Department. But before doing that, the normal course of things is that the Revenue Department should demarcate the land and then hand it over to JDA. We learn that just 7653 kanals and 17 marlas of land out of the huge chunk has been demarcated and formally handed over to the JDA. About the remaining 66436 kanal and one marla of land, which constitute 86 per cent of the total transferred land, has been transferred only on paper without any mandatory demarcation.
Apart from the fact that there is no will at the level of Revenue Department to pursue and bring the matter to its logical conclusion, there appear other elements at work making the entire issue look like a big scam. Nobody, including the Revenue authorities, are able to say for certain that the land transferred to JDA in books has actually been grabbed in part by land grabbers and land mafia and the Revenue Department either did not know about it or just knowingly overlooked the matter, out of pecuniary benefits or nepotism or both. In other words it means that the land record in identified areas and villages in Jammu region is not either credible or is not up to date. Possession is called the nine-tenth of law. If there are encroachments, it has to be entered into land records as bana shikni or breaking the demarcation line. This entry is extraordinarily vital and revenue officials know its importance. If this entry is not there but encroachment has been made, it will be legally very difficult for the Revenue Department or the JDA to get them evicted. How come that the government has been trading or transacting a deal about land which it is not clear to whom it belongs.
Another aspect of this entangled case is that the Revenue authorities know how much and where of land has been encroached upon and by whom. But probably having developed nexus with the land mafia, it is deliberately sleeping over the matter and avoids demarcating the land on the ground. In either case, it is a bizarre case of hoodwinking the Government and obstructing development plans of JDA. We are aware that there is great pressure on Jammu for establishing new housing colonies in the peripheries because there is influx of migrants from rural areas to the city causing imbalance to the ecology of Jammu. But non availability of land for this purpose is hindering the entire developmental scheme and Jammu cannot keep pace with the level of development in other cities of the country.
Sending dozens of reminders to the Revenue Department in which the latter is requested to take up the matter of demarcation of huge chunks of land has not yielded any result or response. It shows how deep the nexus is between the land grabbers and the revenue officials. But this nexus needs to be broken as early as possible. Exasperated JDA has now invoked the Public Services Guarantee Act to intervene in the matter and get the land demarcated. It is for the first time in the history of the state that a PSU has lodged a complaint against a department of the Government seeking it to perform its legal duty of demarcating the allotted land. This indeed is a critical situation and gives the impression that the entire administrative structure covertly supports continuation of encroachment of Nazool land by people closely connected to land mafia. We think that under given circumstances, JDA is not expecting any sense of responsibility dawning upon the Revenue Department. The land mafia are so strongly entrenched that they will not be dislodged. As such perhaps JDA might have to seek court intervention in the matter and try the First Appellate and Second Appellate experiments. In final analysis one can say that this is a sordid state of administration where one department becomes so powerful and resourceful as to force a state agency to invoke implementation of the Act called Public Services Guarantee Act.
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