Railway officials on Tuesday informed a sub-committee of National Assembly Standing Committee on Railways that a significant chunk of Pakistan Railways land measuring 2,612 acres is still under occupation of various encroachers.
The document presented at the committee showed that at the outset of 2012, a country-wide data of land encroachments on Railways system reflected a figure of 5,662.6 acres and so far the ministry has managed to retrieve about 3,050 acres.
A breakdown of the data shows that of the total encroached land, 1,017.8 acres of railway land has been encroached for private agriculture purpose, 191.4 acres for private commercial purposes, 2,212.8 acres for private residential purposes, 441 acres by government departments, 1,352.5 acres by Pak-Armed Force, 436.4 acres by Pakistan Rangers, 5.3 acres by Janbaz force, 2.5 acres by Frontier Constabulary and 2.3 acres by FWO. A major chunk of the encroached land was reported in Lahore where 1,757.4 acres of land was retrieved from the total encroached land measuring 2,581.88 acres.
At present Pakistan Railways owns 167,690 acres of total land across the country. Of this, Railway has 90,326 acres of land in Punjab, 39,428 acres in Sindh, 28,228 acres in Balochistan and 9,707 acres of land in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.
The railway officials informed the committee that Railway administration conducts regular anti-encroachment operations to retrieve its lands and this fight is continued despite the law and order situation.
The officials cited inadequate Pakistan Railway Police force, lack of cooperation between the district police and district administration to handle the law and order situation during the anti-encroachment campaign as well as provincial governments not resolving the land disputes as the key hurdles in wresting back the lands from encroachers.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 24th, 2014.
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