150-year-old land record of LHC building made public

LAHORE: On the orders of Punjab Information Commission, the 150-year-old ownership record of the Lahore High Court building on The Mall Road was made public.

Iqbal Ilyas, a resident of Lahore, applied to the deputy commissioner under the Access to Information Act 2013 that the land on which the Lahore High Court was built had been acquired by the British government in 1870 from his great-grandfather Mehtab Din, for which he was allotted land in Mozang, Nawan Kot and Bela Ram Basti, etc.

Iqbal Ilyas asked the deputy commissioner for records from 1856 to 1954, index and genealogical records. In response to this request filed under the Right to Information Act 2013, the DC did not give any response to the request.

Iqbal Ilyas filed a complaint in the Punjab Information Commission, on which a notice was issued to the DC. Eight hearings were held in the commission, in which the representative of DC office said that some land records of the area (Lahore High Court) were burnt in 1998, on which an FIR was also registered. Since the record is one and a half hundred years old, it requires the help and time of the questioner to find it, he added.

The Punjab Information Commission ordered the DC to make the information public and provide certified copies of the records to Iqbal Ilyas. On the orders of the commission, the DC provided the 150-year-old record of more than 600 pages to the questioner. After issuing the documents to petitioner, the petitioner and his family will legally own the property worth millions of rupees.

During the hearing of the case, the petitioner told the commission that he had faced immense difficulties in obtaining the documents. If the Right to Information Act had not come into force, the doors of access to the information would have been closed on him due to which his entire family would have lost the legal right to the valuable property.