BADIN: More than 40,000 cases of property ownership cases have yet to be brought on record as revenue officials in Shaheed Fazil Rahu taluka have failed to evolve a mechanism to reproduce the history of transactions destroyed during the Dec 27, 2007 disturbances following the assassination of former Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) chairperson and prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

Local revenue officials say it could take many more years to reproduce the record of rights (RoR) destroyed during the nationwide protests, which also affected Shaheed Fazil Rahu taluka.

The situation has rendered the revenue department helpless as no document relating to ownership, transfer/sale deed, mortgage, etc could be retrieved from the charred stores where the files and registers had been kept.

It is worth mentioning here that the property records of 80 out of 95 dehs of the taluka were reduced to ashes when protesters set fire to local revenue offices, besides other government properties, in an spontaneous reaction to Ms Bhutto’s assassination.

Shaheed Fazil Rahu Assistant Commissioner Mohammed Mehboob, when contacted on Thursday, said the record would hopefully be reproduced within a year. Under a policy defined by the Sindh Board of Revenue extreme care was being exercised to avoid forged or wrong entries in the record the rights, he said.

A former assistant commissioner of the area has claimed that he had managed to produce ‘new record of rights’ to replace 70 per cent of it through a scrutiny and verification by people at open kutchehris (public gatherings) but a team constituted by the Sindh High Court expressed its dissatisfaction over authenticity of the new record and called for creating it anew. However, most of the affected khatedars (small growers) believe that they had been left at the mercy of revenue officials when they needed agricultural and other loans from banks.

Many of the affected people frequenting the revenue offices were seen asking public representatives to get a separate team of officials constituted for the purpose of record reproduction as all the staff at these offices often remained busy handling day-to-day work and found no time to spare for the RoR reproduction.

Published in Dawn, January 24th, 2015

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