Ravi National Park scheme

[Lahore_Real_Estate]

Punjab govt sabotaging land value in targeted area

* Residents condemn govt’s move, claim that damage has already been done
* Citizen says rulers ‘using puppets to propagate that scheme had been shelved’

By Afnan Khan

LAHORE: The Punjab government has successfully managed to sabotage the property value in the area which it plans to occupy and reportedly build on a state for its ‘Arab friends’ in the name of the Ravi National Park.

Residents told Daily Times in a survey conducted across the targeted land, consisting of tens of thousands of kanals of land, that the government had inflicted ‘irrecoverable damage’ to citizens by bringing down the value of the property present in Lahore and on the outskirts of the provincial capital.

One of the residents of Jalo area named Gulzar Malik told Daily Times that the recent land grabbing move initiated by the Punjab government and the City District Government Lahore had ruined the futures of tens of thousands of people who were living on the land that the government planned to occupy in the name of the Ravi National Park.

He said the government had not only set up proper camps through the district government in different areas to bar people from doing any kind of construction on the land, but had also managed to reduce property value in the area by using various illegal tactics used by land grabbers, including making the property disputed.

Propagating: He said the government was “using its puppets to propagate in the media that they had shelved the whole Ravi National Park project, but they are actually gearing up their land grabbing campaign”.

Another resident of Baghbanpura named Nargis Bibi told Daily Times that the government was using various tactics to ensure that the masses panic and to decrease their properties’ value by making the land controversial.

“This was the only way they could afford to purchase a huge part of Lahore and the surrounding cities in order to develop a state for their masters sitting in the Arab world. They have forced several people to try and sell their lands, but unfortunately now there are no buyers, which means that anybody will be able to buy the land on their desired prices despite the fact that the land in the area is too valuable to be so simply bought by a government or individual,” she said.

She said the Punjab government was the worst kind of government in the history of Pakistan because none of the previous rulers had tried to sell their own country’s land to foreigners and throw their own citizens out of their houses.

“Only God is our guardian now. We will resist this move until death, but the damage has already been done because the property value will not increase in the coming decades after what the current rulers have done to us. The poor residents and farmers are only cursing the Punjab government and the so-called Khadem-e-Ala because his own son is allegedly involved in the land grabbing move and he is letting it happen to the people who trusted him and elected him,” one of the victims of the scandal said.

Daily Times had recently reported that the City District Government Lahore had set up various camps in different areas coming under the Ravi National Park to bar people from constructing any building or structure on their own land in order to reduce the value of the property in the area by making it controversial and finally forcing owners of the property to sell it for peanuts before the government’s selected people.

The move is being considered the biggest land grabbing scandal ever launched by any government to deprive more than 1.3 million of people of their houses, businesses and agricultural land. A few of the representatives of the Ravi National Park victims, Khudam-e-Kissan Welfare Society Chairman Haji Mukhtar Ahmed and Malik Fehmaish, told Daily Times that the district officer (Revenue), Lahore, in January 2009 issued a notification under Section 4 of the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, which stated that the land was likely to be acquired by the Government of Punjab, Forest Department for public purpose.

The notice victimised 216 villages, 1,000 mosques, 200 schools, 200 graveyards and 140,438 acres of fertile agricultural land in five different tehsils, including Lahore City, Lahore Cantt, Sharaqpur Sharif, Ferozewala and Muridkay, where more than 1.3 million people were residing and producing crops worth 29.260 billion annually, they said.

They alleged that later on the night in between March 22-23, teams of patwaris under the supervision of District Coordination Officer (DCO) Sajjad Ahmad Bhutta started a campaign of wall chalking in Lahore, which contained the text, “Punjab government banned any construction and sale/purchase of land.”