KARACHI, Aug 24: The provincial assembly’s special committee for the Sindh Tenancy Act has requested the provincial minister, the secretary for law and the advocate-general Sindh to attend their meeting next month to help amend the act to the satisfaction of peasants and farmers, members told Dawn.

The 13-member committee was formed by the provincial assembly in its last session with Anwer Maher, an MPA from Sukkur, as its chairman, to work out amendments so that disputes between peasants and farmers could be settled amicably.

The committee held its fourth meeting at the Sindh Assembly building on Friday since its formation in June in which MPAs, a senior member of the Board of Revenue (BoR) and representatives from the Sindh Abadgaar Board, Sindh Reformers’ Forum and other experts participated.

“So far we have given a full reading, clause-by-clause, to the Sindh Tenancy Act and identified various anomalies and grey areas where proper amendments could cause a huge positive impact and help minimise conflicts between the two sides,” Anwer Maher told Dawn.

He said the BoR official on Friday explained various ambiguities in the Tenancy Act to the committee.

“Earlier,” he said, “we had thought that a paragraph in the act’s chapter 2 was Muslim-specific and against the minorities. But the revenue official explained to us that it was proper in its content and not ill-intended.”

The act’s chapter 2, paragraph 10, states that if a deceased hari is a Muslim, his heir would be considered a hari. It was earlier conceived that it was in total violation of human rights as many peasants are non-Muslims.

However, the revenue official said the act also mentions non-Muslim haris, where the matter pertaining to heirs is settled in conformity with their own religious interpretations.

Mr Maher said the 2002 amendment to the Tenancy Act contained sufficient safeguards to protect the interests of both tenants and landlords. But the problem lay in the implementation, which was a function of the board of revenue.

“We invited the BoR official for this very purpose and his participation was very useful,” said Mr Maher.The present amended act contains the provision of a one-man ‘mukhtarkar tribunal’ to adjudicate disputes between growers and tenants.

“Mukhtarkars also have magisterial powers to settle disputes but to keep matters transparent we are also contemplating the establishment of courts presided over by judicial magistrates with representatives from the parties concerned,” said the committee’s chairman.

He said another intention behind reviewing the act was to do away with the menace of private jails allegedly being run by feudal lords in some parts of lower Sindh.

“We have been tasked to make the act more harmonious and to end all possibilities of (the existence of) private jails in Sindh,” Mr Maher said.The committee will meet again on Sept 5.