LAHORE: The farmers have announced to strongly resist the takeover of their agriculture land for the Ravi Riverfront Urban Development Project.

“Recently, there was a meeting in which a government team, headed by the Board of Revenue (BoR) senior member, the spokesman for the Ravi Urban Development Authority (RUDA) and several representatives of the area, led by the Pakistan Muslim League (Functional), Mustafa Rasheed, were present. During the meeting, the government team briefed the landowners on the plan related to land acquisition for the Ravi project and they categorically rejected it,” an official source told Dawn on Saturday.

“We are ready to give our land for the development of the lake alone in the public interest. But we will never hand over our land to any land developer on the pretext of the Ravi project execution,” the source quoted Mr Rasheed as having said in the meeting while expressing his anger over the government land acquisition plan.

Meanwhile, according to a video clip, Mr Rasheed while representing the farmers, warned the government against taking over the land.

“I just want to clear one thing. Your response is not positive since you think that you have acquired our land by imposing Section 5 of the Land Acquisition Act. But we want to tell you clearly that you have not yet done this since we are still owners of our land, which is in our possession,” he told the team.

Published in Dawn, February 7th, 2021