The report of the Task Force for Recovery of Public Land and Its Protection, submitted on Monday by its Chairman, retired senior bureaucrat V. Balasubramanian, comes at a time when charges of corruption and appropriation of public wealth are being made almost every day against people in the highest positions of political power in Karnataka.
The 96-page hard-hitting report, tellingly titled ‘Greed and Connivance', puts the total government and public land encroached upon in Karnataka at 4.8 lakh hectares. It lays bare the process by which the political class and the bureaucracy have ignored this encroachment, and in many cases actively connived in it. The fact that the task force could recover only 4 per cent of the total land in its 20-month tenure is itself proof of this collusion.
The task force was set up in July 2009 by the B.S. Yeddyurappa government to identify and recover encroached government land. It was a successor to a Legislature Committee set up in July 2005 under A.T. Ramaswamy to study the encroachment on government and public land in Bangalore Urban and Rural districts.
The report has a section entitled ‘Collusion of Government Officials and Elected Public Officials in Land Grabbing,' in which the instances of land-grab and the ways in which public servants have been in overt or covert collusion with land-grabbers are described. The report dwells at length on how large tracts of forest land have been encroached on and not recovered. The highest is in the Shimoga circle (16.071 hectares) followed by Chikmagalur (14,378 hectares). The report describes how lake beds and water-bodies in Bangalore city have been encroached upon by builders, and how departments like the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) have lost land worth thousands of crores of rupees to real estate sharks.
‘Commitment needed'
“The identification and removal of encroachment on public land is a mammoth task. It requires the commitment of the government and all its officials, especially by the departments of forest and revenue, if any worthwhile result is to be obtained,” says the report. How the “commitment” was found entirely lacking is illustrated graphically in the report. The task force could do little as it had to work through the same bureaucratic machinery that was in the first place responsible for allowing encroachments.
