Sahiwal:- In line with the direction of the chief minister Punjab Usman Buzdar the district administration Saiwal carried out a Land Retrieval Operation In Burewala Sahiwal and retrieved 160 canals of precious State land worth billions of Rupees. The Assistant Commissioner Burewala along with the officials of the revenue department launched the operation in Chack 49-KB and recovered the state land. The team also demolished illegal construction on the state land. The Punjab government is on its way to taking on the illegal occupants and land mafias in the province. The campaign against the land grabbers was started last year when through the Cadastral Mapping it was revealed that at least millions of acres of State land has been occupied by the mafias. The government decided to take indiscriminate action against the land grabbers.
Last year the government started a massive campaign against the land mafia and by the end of November, the government announced that they had recovered 180,000 acres of land worth Rs 473 billion. The government had also set up the target of retrieving all of the state lands by the end of December last year but the operations in different areas are still going on and thousands of acres of land are yet to be recovered. The CM Buzdar himself is reported to be monitoring the operations against illegal occupants. The government has also opted for a policy to use such lands for public welfare like education and health and social services as a priority before thinking of selling privately. The Secretary Board of Revenue told last year, "We have written to all the Deputy Commissioners that only those state lands would be offered to private persons, which cannot be utilized for public purpose”.During the Ongoing campaign of the incumbent government, the Senior Member Board of Revenue Baber Hayat Tarar said that the government would retrieve every inch of state land from the land grabbers without any discrimination.
Earlier last year Prime Minister Imran Khan had vowed to launch operations throughout the country for retrieval of the state land. The premier had told that the cadastral mapping had shown a massive land Encroachment worth Rs 5.5 trillion. He termed it a shocking fact and said, “The total value of all encroached state land and those in the three major cities stood at approximately Rs5.5 trillion, whereas the land encroached in three major cities (Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad) alone was valued at Rs2.63trillion. Similarly, Encroached Forest Land was worth around Rs1.86 trillion,” the prime minister termed it a “shocking fact.” Similarly, forest mapping of 30,000 KM revealed that 70,000 acres of the forest area have also been encroached by land grabbers. The cadastral mapping also showed that only in the capital city around 1000 acres of forest land had been encroached. The Takhtpari forest in Rawalpindi had a total of 2210 acres of land out of which 755 acres have encroached, similarly, 629 acres of land have encroached in the Lohi Bear Forest area. The PM has time and again shown his resolve to recover the state land from mafias by all means.
