One of the serious bottlenecks for Tripura’s development process turns out to be allotment of lands for the intending industrialists and entrepreneurs. Even though the industrialists from outside and also from the state often show interest in setting up of their units and invest in Tripura, and also to pay price for the land, the government finds it difficult to provide them with required area. It is not that there is no land with the government –khas land- which can be allotted to the industrialists. There are enough khas lands with the state government, notwithstanding the fact that a major part of the state comes under various categories of Forest area restrictions. The problem is huge khas land are either encroached or occupied by people illegally.
The Tripura Land Revenue and Land Reforms Act 1960 (11th amendment) empowers the District Collectors and Subdivisional Collectors to recover the land if occupied illegally but there are some practical problems too.
“During the Left Front rule thousands of acres khas lands were occupied by people with strong political connections illegally and they turned them to rubber plantations”, said a senior officer.
“Now most of the rubber trees are either giving latex or are fully matured and ready for latex production. It poses a practical problem for the authorities to recover the occupied land. Any such attempt, even if armed with related provisions from the TLRLR Acts, will inevitably lead to legal battle and that will take time to settle. Besides, felling of thousands of latex producing rubber trees is also an unpleasantly tough task”, he said and then added: If you , for example, check the land records of Southern side of Agartala, you will find huge tracts of land were converted to rubber plantations illegally.
He opined that government could very well recover the lands but for that a decisive and strong political will would be necessary.
Why only khas land , allegations were also made against a senior political CPM leader in South Tripura of occupying 2000 Kanis of land belonging to Tripura Horticulture Development Corporation.
Another officer pointed out that after the BJP-IPFT government came to power some steps were taken to bring back the encroached land.
“Since 2018 as many as 519 plots illegally occupied by civilians and 219 plots occupied illegally by religious bodies were recovered” he said.
The Left Front had given patta to about 1, 28, 000 beneficiaries. But as it happened during a survey government also noticed massive discrepancies between the original map of the land and physical status of the land occupied by patta holders.
(Representative pic taken from Internet)
