Cong protests against notification to farmers to vacate land in border areas

Thursday, 19/11/2015

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AJNALA: Congress activists staged a protest against the government here on Wednesday for issuing a notification asking certain farmers to vacate government land that they had been tilling since the early sixties. The activists were accompanied by a large number of farmers.

Congress workers and farmers protesting against the Punjab government at Ajnala on Wednesday.

The land in contention is around 2,600 acres, most of which has been reclaimed over the years by the farmers in the basin of the Ravi river following a change in its course. This land stretches from Shahzada village to Hasihimpura and around 1,600 poor families will be affected by this notification which was issued by the state government on the directions of the Supreme Court sometime ago.

The protesters, led by former Congress MLA of the area, Harpatap Singh Ajnala, held a rally near the Sakki drain and then marched in a procession to the office of the sub-divisional magistrate (SDM) to submit a memorandum on the issue. In the absence of the SDM, the memorandum was handed over to the tehsildhar.

Giving details of the notification, Ajnala said that the notification was applicable to all those families that had got the government land registered in the name of their family members after September 2007. The land was got registered after the farmers approached the state government with the plea that they be given permanent possession of the land which they had been tilling since the early sixties, he claimed while adding that as per government orders, they had made a payment of `7,000 per acre for the registry.

The Congress leader further said that the farmers began reclaiming the land in the river basin after the then state chief minister, the late Partap Singh Kairon, gave his approval during a visit to the area. Kairon had asked the farmers to work hard as the country needed food grains to feed the nation and he even promised that the land would become their permanent possession if they showed results, he added.

“Unfortunately after Kairon, none of the other chief ministers bothered for the rights of the farmers. However during Capt Amarinder Singh’s tenure, a decision was taken to give the farmers permanent rights over the land and then when the SADBJP government took over in 2007, a notification was issued asking farmers to get the land registered in their names,” he claimed while pointing out that thereafter farmers began to get the land registered in their individual names.

Ajnala further said the farmers were now feeling cheated by the latest notification asking them to give up possession of the land. He pointed out that as most of the land in contention belonged to the central government, the matter went to court a couple of years ago.

“Instead of showing concern for the farmers of the state, the government showed little or no interest in the case in court. The net result was that the lower courts ruled in favour of the central government and the apex court upheld the orders of the lower courts,” he claimed.

Addressing the rally, the Congress leader charged the state government of betraying the farmers. Almost all the affected families were not financially well off, owning about one to two acres of land, he added.

In the memorandum, the farmers appealed to the state government to take a sympathetic view of the entire case and allow them to keep the land. They demanded that the state government should sort out the matter with the central government.