The settlement operations were set into motion in Jammu and Kashmir several decades ago but the same are going on with a speed set and chosen wilfully by those who were tasked to accomplish the same expeditiously. But the moot question is precisely what the problems on the ground are.
The Government has totally not come up to the desired levels of expectations in empowering Regional Directors of Land Records and Surveys. It may be recalled that these posts were created with the sole objective of giving necessary momentum to the very important exercise of land settlement operations nearly more than five years back. We reiterate for fixing targets for officers involved in the process, agreeably after taking the consent followed by commitment from the concerned officials on board, fixing the period within which to achieve and accordingly reward and penalise the performers and those who do not respectively, alone were concomitants of achieving desired results which would start trickling in automatically to the entire satisfaction of the authorities concerned.
In the absence of such an approach which is warranted and required by the Government to focus on the issue, motives can be attributed that perhaps Government deliberately wanted things to move very slowly in such a way that it did not want to keep its apparatus updated with correct land records. Such a scenario which otherwise had potentialities of scams, irregularities and litigations taking place should be the first priority to be avoided and chances thereof minimised to the barest possible levels.
It is not that the State Government did not realise that absolutely nothing worthwhile was happening in respect of achieving any progress in the exercise which was, in fact, started many years back, to address which it gave its acquiesce for reorganization of the Settlement Organization. It further accordingly created seven posts of Regional Directors of Land Records and Surveys so that land records could be settled in a modernized way under the Centrally Sponsored Scheme. This all was done in 2013 and before they could show the results of whatever levels, in the year 2014, the Government appeared to be wiser enough to divest these Regional Directors of the manpower to utilize them elsewhere in newly created administrative units. So a double edged sword aborted the whole move; one- not replenishing the deficit of manpower created in the year 2014 and two- not to empower the Regional Directors even after elapsing of five long years.
Under Governor’s rule, currently enough stress is admittedly laid on anti encroachment drive but what is needed further is the commitment to gearing up settlement operations and modernization of land records by empowering the Regional Directors. That will be one big decisive step to contain scams, frauds and related irregularities in the area under reference.
Trending Now
E-Paper
Follow our WhatsApp channel