Land mafia grabs pricey public land in KP

PESHAWAR: The all-powerful land mafia in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has illegally grabbed thousands of kanal of pricey public land in urban localities in the jurisdictions of Town Municipal Administrations (TMAs), local area authorities (LAAs) and the the scenic Galiyat.
The land grabbers of these expensive pieces of land included government departments, retired government and armed forces officials and wealthy businessmen.
In the summer resorts in various localities of Galiyat alone, over 30 percent of public land of the Galiyat Development Authority (GDA) has been illegally occupied by the land grabbers. Sources in the Civil Secretariat, while sharing data on the occupied public land with this scribe, said on Friday that Local Government Election and Rural Development Department (LGE&RDD) has submitted details of the land that has been grabbed to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Secretary Muhammad Azam Khan.
The sources said that secretary local government Jamaluddin Shah, who has taken notice of the lack of data on the illegally occupied public land, had directed the TMAs, LAAs and other district local government authorities to gather data on the public land illegally occupied in their respective jurisdictions.
According to the sources, he had warned the officials concerned against any dereliction in collection of the data of the grabbed public land. The sources said that for the first time the details of the illegally occupied public land under the jurisdiction of the local government institutions were consolidated and submitted to the higher authorities in the province.
The data provided by GDA and Peshawar Development Authority (PDA) has been consolidated while consolidation of the data received from other institutions such as TMAs and other LAAs was under process.
However, the initial data received from these entities presented an alarming picture of illegally occupied public land in the southern districts of the province. According to the data submitted by the GDA, the local government possessed 319 kanal of pricey land in the mountainous Galiyat area famous for tourism and around 98.5 kanal of this land has been grabbed by 314 powerful individuals and origanizations.
This illegally occupied land is in Abbottabad, Nathiagali, Donga Gali, Khaira Gali, Ayubia, Khanaspur, Changagali and Changlagali.
In Nathiagali, 74 land grabbers have illegally occupied 19.25 kanal of the total 58 kanal of the public land. This included 65 residential and commercial plots and 13 shops. In Donga Gali, 10 people illegally occupied 6.6 kanal of the public land. In Changlagali, 26 kanal of public land has been grabbed.
In Khanaspur, 25 kanal of public land had been illegally occupied while in Ayubia over nine kanal of land has been usurped.
In the Khaira Gali area of Galiyat, 12.9 kanal of the public land has been illegally occupied for decades. The data shows that in Hayatabad town in Peshawar, 47 kanal of public land has been grabbed by individuals and organisations.
The Peshawar Development Authority (PDA) reported that the Police Department had occupied two kanal of green area in Phase-III,10 kanal of graveyard land in Phase-I and one kanal commercial plot in the Community Centre in Phase-III .
It said that the Peshawar High Court (PHC) on March 30 ordered the vacation of the green area land, but the Police Department didn't comply with the court order. The Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) had illegally occupied 30 kanal plot of commercial land in Phase-II that has already been cancelled. A petrol pump has been illegally built on four kanal of pricey public land in Phase-V of Hayatabad. However, no information has been provided about the green belts and the smaller spots occupied illegally by residents in the posh Hayatabad town in Peshawar.