E-Paper
Land grabbing: Gujarat govt cracks a whip on violators, 586 FIRs so far
Gujarat revenue minister Rajendra Trivedi said that the state government has succeeded in freeing private land worth ₹1,075 crore from the mafias who illegally occupied them.
AHMEDABAD: The Gujarat government has cracked a whip on encroachers who have grabbed government and private land in the state using forged documents and tampering land records.
Government officials close to the development said that the authorities have lodged 586 first information reports (FIRs) involving 2256 people after the enactment of the anti-land grabbing Act in the state assembly last year. Charge sheets have been filed in 336 cases, they said.
In the state assembly, Gujarat revenue minister Rajendra Trivedi said on Friday that a total of 12,342 complaints related to land grabbing of almost 1014 hectare of private land were received, of which 818 complaints were found to be genuine.
According to the revenue minister, the government has succeeded in freeing private land worth ₹1,075 crore from the mafias who illegally occupied them.
In the case of government-owned land, 499 complaints have been received of land grabbing incidents. The total area of such illegally occupied land will be about 695 hectare, he said.
The minister said that a total of 99 FIRs have been lodged against 478 individuals in such instances.
The Gujarat Land Grabbing (Prohibition) Act, passed in 2020, was brought into force following several instances of farmland encroachments in urban areas that led to a rise in realty prices.
Under the law, any individual, company, or group of people including religious and charity organisations, who illegally grab land, provides money for construction, threatens the owner, extorts rent, or aids in any such activity is regarded as a land grabber. The complaints are scrutinised by the special investigation teams constituted at every district of the state. The law provides for 10 years of imprisonment, extendable up to 14 years, for the violators.
On Friday, the state assembly passed the Gujarat Land Grabbing (Prohibition)(Amendment) Bill-2022, which proposes that the word ‘land’ in the original Act “shall not include the land in respect of which applications for grants are pending on the date of commencement of this Act under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights), Act, 2006”.
The amendment is meant to protect tribals from any penal action under the Land Grabbing Act if they had already applied for allocation of land under Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act.
