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Kathmandu Thursday March 08, 2001 Falgun 25, 2057.
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Local
stalwarts grab public land
Post Report
MEHELKUNA, Surkhet, March 7 - The committee
members who have been entrusted by the government to allocate plots to landless squatters
have themselves grabbed the land.
In many plots the squatters had built pucca
house with the money remitted by their sons working in far away lands. These plots which
were supposed to have officially allocated and registered in their names have secretly
been registered in the names of local bullies.
The Surkhet unit of the Committee for the
Resolution of the Landless Squatters’ Problem allotted the publicly-owned plot to a
former VDC Chairman, Bal Bahadur Khatri two years ago. This was the plot on which the poor
family of Dande Sarki, resident of Mehelkuna VDC, had been living for past 33 years.
"Sinners they are," bewails
miserable Sarki, "I would, at least, not have wasted two hundred thousand rupees on
building the house."
Dande Sarki’s plight is not the only
case. The sorrow of these downtrodden people is even more heart-rending when one finds
that the lucky guys to get the allotments are persons who already possess considerable
wealth and property, and some of them do not even actually live in the vicinity.
Says a former lawmaker, Chandra Bahadur
Budha, "The team which came here to identify the genuine landless ended up by
illegally allotting plots to almost 43 local stalwarts, many of whom are established
politicians or teachers."
Worse still, public roads and religious
premises have not been spared. The plots adjoining these social and religious sites have
been alloted in the name private individuals who are not even the residents of Meheluna
VDC.
However, the crime does not lie solely with the
then team leader, Mohammad Yusuf, who made such indiscriminate allotments. "Our
social and political culture lies at the root of such mindless misadventures," says
former MP Budha, adding, " the apparent immunity that the criminals enjoy leaves open
enough grounds to fear a similar trend to continue in the future also."
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