Jammu land mafia is tenaciously glued to its illegal activity of grabbing State land wherever it can. Some time back, various Government departments including the Police Department were galvanized into action and they succeeded in remove illegal occupation of hundreds of kanals of State or forestland near Golf Course in Sidhra. As long as the police post remained deployed at the site of land recovery, things were normal. However, when the post was closed land mafia became active again and started grabbing the land. Finding that there was no reaction from the Government, many pucca structures came up in due course of time along the edges of the grabbed land. Even some commercial complexes also came up and the Government remained unmoved.
The question is that essentially there is a big dispute between three departments over the ownership of the land in question. These are the Departments of Forestry, JDA and the Revenue Department. Revenue records are not very specific about the ownership. Absence of any regular landmarks at the site and non-description of boundary line where it separates private lands from the disputed one adds to the difficulty. Land grabbers are aware of the raging dispute among three alleged owners of the land and they are making the best of it by recording covert support of one or the other party. In the process, hundreds of kanals of State land is slipping out of the control of the Government. The land grabbers are emboldened by the raging dispute among the three departments and no wonder if they resort to violent resistance and stone pelting when things come head on to a crisis.
This is an embarrassing situation for the Government. Civil society feels disappointed over the inability of three alleged owners not coming to any solution about real ownership. The Government must immediately constitute a committee with powers to arbitrate over the ownership of the disputed lands. That is the first step in protecting the land from the rapacity of land grabbers. Thereafter when the land is demarcated clearly on the ground, the owners have the responsibility to ensure safety and non-encroachment of their holdings. That is the only way that this issue can be resolved.
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