The legislative assembly on Friday passed the Karnataka Land Grabbing Prohibition Bill, 2011, to tackle the land mafia.
The legislative assembly on Friday passed the Karnataka Land Grabbing Prohibition Bill, 2011, to tackle the land mafia. The bill provides for punishing land-grabbers with up to three years of imprisonment.
The bill seeks to bring several measures to curb organised attempts to grab land belonging to government departments, religious institutions and charitable endowments, local bodies or other statutory or non-statutory bodies owned or controlled or managed by the government.
The bill has provisions for constituting a special court for speedy trial of land-grab cases and ensure punishment. The bill has been adopted in the wake of recommendations by various committees that studied land-grab cases in all urban centres, with Bangalore in the forefront.
For instance, the joint legislature committee on encroachment of government land in Bangalore Urban district, headed by former MLA AT Ramaswamy, in its report, stated that 45,000 acres worth Rs50,000 crore had been encroached. The bill declares that land grabbing in any form is illegal.
The bill defines a land grabber as a person or a group of persons, society, builder, land developer who commits or has committed land-grabbing. It also includes any person who gives financial aid to any person for taking illegal possession of land or for construction of unauthorised structures thereon, or who collects or attempts to collect from any occupiers of such land rent, compensation and other charges by criminal intimidation, or who abets the doing of any of the above mentioned acts; and also includes the successors in interest.
According to the bill: “Those who contravene provisions of the act — as also those who commit other offences in connection with land grabbing — shall, on conviction, be punished with imprisonment for a term that shall not be less than one year, but which may extend to three years, and with fine which may extend to Rs25,000.”
Urban development and law minister S Suresh Kumar said the state had passed the Karnataka Land Grabbing (Prohibition) Bill, 2007, but the Centre had suggested inclusion of land belonging to Wakf boards, Hindu religious institutions and charitable endowments and they were incorporated in the present bill.
According to the bill, land grabbers are forming bogus cooperative housing societies or setting up fictitious claims and indulging in large-scale and fraudulent sale of land through unscrupulous real estate dealers or otherwise in favour of certain sections of people, thus resulting in accumulation of unaccounted wealth.
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