LAHORE, Jan 31: About 2.6 million acres of state land will be distributed among landless farmers, it is learnt.

The ministry of local government and rural development is preparing a policy framework on the directive of President Gen Pervez Musharraf for distribution of land among landless tenants. For this purpose the federal government has set up a committee to work out details of the policy. The data collected from all over the country has indicated that 2,612,619 acres of state land is available for distribution.

Distribution of land is a part of the government’s poverty alleviation programme which the president has given top priority in his strategy for economic revival of Pakistan.

A spokesman for the ministry of local government and rural development said in countries like Pakistan where a large portion of population lived in abject deprivation, economic growth was possible only if poverty alleviation was given priority in economic planning.

He said since a majority of people lived in rural areas, there was great need of improving their living environment. This would help in economic growth of the country. He thought that previous public sector efforts for poverty alleviation had been mostly welfare oriented and limited in scope. Land reforms of 1959 and 1972 introduced by Ayub Khan and Z. A. Bhutto had not achieved desired results as most of the land could not be acquired due to large exemptions and the poor landless farmers were not able to get much of the acquired land. Thus there was need to learn lessons from the past experiments. Half hearted attempts made during the past 10 years to give land to landless tenants failed as in many cases the land was taken back by the landlords from whom it was acquired.

He was of the view that traditional isolated development efforts like paving streets, village electrification and building of latrines, etc., had not been successful in alleviating poverty.

He said the government was committed to removing this approach by integrating the rural poor class in national development through delivering land to the landless farmers which would help alleviate poverty to a large extent.