Stopping land grabbing: ‘Only genuine villages will be regularised’

KARACHI:

Sindh Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah has said that the lease of 70 villages of district Malir has been cancelled on legal grounds but a fresh survey will be conducted to regularise the genuine villages. "This exercise has been done to get rid of land grabbers who had grabbed government land in the name of villages," he said.

 "We will conduct a fresh survey," the chief minister said, adding that the rightful villagers will not be deprived of their rights. Shah said that under the Urban Villages Regularisation law of 2008, villages existing before or up to the year 2000 qualify to be regularised.

In 2012, around 70 villages of district Malir were regularised without fulfilling legal requirements. He said that before a village is regularised, its complete survey is conducted to ascertain the area of the village, number of people living there, houses, mosques and even industrial units, if any, located in the area and the year when it was established. But in this case, these formalities were not met.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 5^th, 2015.