Sindh Assembly opposition leader Haleem Adil Sheikh has demanded a judicial inquiry into alleged large-scale land grabbing through counterfeit documentation in the province.
Addressing a press conference along with MPA Saeed Afridi, senior PTI leader Muzaffar Shujrah, President PTI Youth Wing Moula Bux Soomro and others at the Sindh Assembly building on Tuesday, he said 3.9 million acres of land were under illegal occupation in the province. Over 2.8 million acres of forest land and above a million acres of state land had been encroached throughout Sindh, while more than 100,000 acres of land had been illegally occupied in Karachi alone in connivance with officers of the revenue department and other relevant agencies of the provincial government, he claimed.
The opposition leader alleged that 500,000 entries in the revenue record were fake and the deputy commissioners of different districts and members of the land utilisation department were involved in land grabbing, while many of them were under investigation as well.
He said an entire district of Karachi had been handed over to certain people as a reward for political maneuvering in Balochistan, while the revenue record had been burnt to facilitate land grabbing, which was at its peak.
State land along the Northern Bypass was being encroached and the anti-encroachment force had become an “encroachment police” in Sindh, he said and held the PPP’s Sindh government responsible for the illegal construction of the Nasla Tower.
He argued that in 2013 a no-objection certificate was issued for the project after fake documentation through various provincial departments, including the Co-operative Societies Department, Sindh Building Control Authority KMC and Local Government Department.
All the ministers and officers who headed the relevant departments during the course of the time were responsible for the situation and they must be held accountable and brought to justice, Sheikh demanded, saying that the compensation amount meant to be disbursed among the affected residents of the Nasla Tower should be recovered from those officers and public office holders.
He also expressed sympathy with people who had purchased apartments in the Nasla Tower, as they had witnessed official NOCs and documents and were unaware that all those documents were fake and counterfeit.
Expressing concerns over the inordinate delay in the rehabilitation of Gujar Nullah-affected population, he said the Sindh government could not acquire land for resettling the affected people and was illogically connecting the issue with receivables from a private builder. The federal government had already issued Rs35 billion to the FWO and the NDMA and work was under progress, he added.
He also condemned the project for the construction of a new CM House and suggested that Rs1.2 billion allocated for the purpose could be utilised to compensate the affected people of Gujjar Nullah and Nasla Tower.