Can Bangalore reclaim its public land from 'influential' land-grabbers? (Karnataka Newsletter)

More than six years after a legislators' panel exposed massive encroachment of public land in Bangalore, the Karnataka government is finally taking baby steps to reclaim its property.

The task seems easier said than done as the squatters and land-grabbers include, according to the panel, religious figures, politicians, bureaucrats and realtors.

But the government is determined to reclaim the land and knows that its move might "antagonize several influential people," Revenue Minister V. Sreenivas Prasad said in the legislative council Wednesday.

The legislators' panel, set up in 2006 by the then Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S)-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) coalition government, had estimated that around 40,000 acres of land worth over Rs.40,000 crore (then $9 billion) had been encroached upon in Bangalore.

There was no action on the panel's report submitted in 2007 as the coalition collapsed and the subsequent BJP government set up a committee headed by retired state additional chief secretary V. Balasubramanian in 2009 to study the issue afresh.

The Balasubramanian panel submitted its report in 2011, endorsing what the previous committee had said. The BJP government, however, did not act on it, despite Governor H. R. Bhardwaj publicly reminding it many times to implement the report.

Now, the Congress government, which took office in May after defeating the BJP in the assembly elections, says it is firm on implementing the recommendations of both the committees to reclaim encroached land and take steps to prevent land grabbing.

Prasad told the legislative council that a task force headed by a senior Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer will be set up soon to clear the encroachments.

He assured the council that the government "is serious" about acting on the reports of the two committees to take back "precious land worth thousands of crores of rupees encroached upon by the land mafia".

Prasad's assurance came as a bit of a surprise as the Congress, which was in the opposition in 2007, had dismissed the legislators' panel report as a "witch hunt" against the party.

For the panel, which was headed by the then JD-S legislator A. T. Ramaswamy, had named several Congress leaders as land grabbers in its 1,000-page report but no leader of consequence from the JD-S or the BJP was named.

Ramaswamy had defended the panel's report, saying it was based on official documents obtained from various departments whose land has been grabbed.

The land taken over by the grabbers belongs to the revenue, forests, minor irrigation, health, animal husbandry and transport departments, as also the Bangalore Development Authority, the Karnataka Industrial Areas Development Board, the Bangalore City Corporation, the Karnataka Housing Board, the Wakf Board, the Bangalore University and the Karnataka Slum Clearance Board.

The panel found that the grabbers had not even spared graveyards, dry lakes and tank beds.

Prasad has not set any time frame for a proposed task force to reclaim the encroached land.

Hopefully, the legislators will often keep reminding the government of its promise so that land-scarce Bangalore will not end up as an encroacher's paradise.

(V.S. Karnic can be contacted at vs.karnic@ians.in)