PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Board of Revenue has retrieved over Rs60 billion worth of 4,100 kanals government land from encroachers in 30 districts of the province with the help of the relevant authorities.

The documents available with Dawn show Hangu district at the top of the list with 1143 kanals of recovered land, whose market value is Rs238 million.

In the provincial capital, the board and relevant authorities recovered 668 kanals of land, which carried the whopping market value of Rs39 billion.

Mardan recorded the recovery of 322 kanals of land with a price tag of Rs15 billion, Abbottabad 82 kanals valuing Rs2.57 billion, Dera Ismail Khan 276 kanals valuing Rs2.15 billion and Nowshera district 477 kanals valuing Rs1.2 billion.

A total of 326 kanals of land worth Rs3.9 billion has been recovered in Charsadda district, 71 kanals in Lakki Marwat, 67 kanals in Buner, 66 kanlas in Bannu, 34 kanals in Haripur and 33 kanals in Manshera.

Board of Revenue official says land record being digitised

Senior Member Board of Revenue (SMBR) Syed Zafar Ali Shah told Dawn that the land had been recovered in the crackdown against land grabbers and encroachers, which had been under way since last Jan.

He said besides anti-encroachment drive, his department was also working on digitisation of state land records all over the province.

“We are making a database of state lands all over the province,” he said.

Mr Shah said that the project was being undertaken by the Survey of Pakistan and was likely to be completed by March next year.

He said that his department had provided all data of the state lands to the Survey of Pakistan, which was digitising it.

The SMBR said that the records would help curb the grabbing and encroachment of government lands due to easy access compared to the existing cumbersome and time-consuming procedure of manual examination.

He said that under the computerisation of land record project, the details of 1,300 mouzas had been digitised during the last one year.

Mr Shah said that under the project, which was launched in 2013, around 3,500 mouzas land records were to be digitised in 19 districts of the province.

He, however, said that in four years only, 350 mouzas land record digitisation had been made. The SMBR said the project had picked up pace and in the last one year, the land records in a total of 1,300 mouzas had been digitised, while 1,200 others would be completed by Dec this year.

He said that the digitisation of the land records was a major project and such initiative often also entailed inherent resistance from the system.

“We are also working on geographical information system-based settlement in the merged tribal districts. Currently, work is in progress in seven tehsils of the region,” he said.

Mr Shah added that of those tehsils, two were in Kurram, one each in Bajaur and Khyber, and the rest in the erstwhile frontier regions.

He said that his department had also set up 26 service delivery centres in different parts of the province, where fard and property transfer facilities were easily available.

The SMBR added that those centres would be established at tehsil levels across the province.

Published in Dawn, September 8th, 2021