HYDERABAD: Work is under way on 229 acres of valuable state land in the Gulistan-i-Sarmast area of Latifabad on the basis of a revenue document that the district administration and revenue officials regard as invalid.

Official documents seen by Dawn show that the land is being claimed by a group of private individuals who rely on a Ghat Wadh Form-16 that the Director Settlement Survey and Land Records has cancelled. They are seeking its restoration. A Ghat Wadh Form assigns a survey number to unsurveyed land and records changes in surveyed land, and it leads the revenue department to generate an ownership entry in the record of rights.

The correspondence supporting the form’s restoration has been termed fake and fabricated. The district administration has resisted the claim, and revenue officials have refused to mutate the 229 acres.

The land is located in Deh Ganjo Takkar, Latifabad taluka, a hilly area where private housing societies are fast coming up. It is linked to the Gulistan-i-Sarmast area of Latifabad, which is owned by the Hyderabad Development Authority (HDA).

The Ghat Wadh Form-16 for the 229 acres was issued in 2014 and an entry was made in Form-VII, but the director later cancelled the form. A private housing scheme was launched on 60 of the 229 acres in 2020. An official of the Latifabad revenue taluka said the order cancelling Form-16 had not yet been communicated to the office of the assistant commissioner (AC), Latifabad.

“These people are raising a boundary wall on the basis of the restoration of their Ghat Wadh Form-16 and the creation of survey numbers for the land. The form has been declared fake in a correspondence, so ownership does not exist. Still, they are lifting sand from there,” said an official.

The land is close to the 225 acres identified or proposed for the Cantonment Board Hyderabad (CBH) Employees Co-operative Housing Society and the Sindh High Court Employees Society. Both societies are also pursuing allotment of their land through the courts.

CBH society chairman Naseemul Haq wrote to the secretary of the Cooperative Department on Sept 24, asking him to take legal action against “land grabbers” to protect the rights of the society’s members. Mr Haq confirmed the authenticity of the letter, seen by Dawn. In it he named Ali Gul Brohi, Meer Hassan Brohi, Noor Ali Pathan, his sons and others, alleging that they were taking soil unlawfully, and without permission from the competent authority, from the society’s proposed 225-acre site.

Hyderabad Deputy Commissioner Zainul Abiden Memon, for his part, alerted the concerned officials on the basis of the land record. In a letter dated July 10, 2026, also seen by Dawn, he said his office had “sufficient grounds to believe” that a group of private individuals “may be acting in connivance with certain staff members having access to records in your office”. The letter said: “It appears repeated attempts are made to prepare fake and fabricated official correspondence and records for restoration of the subject Ghat Wadh Form particularly during transfer and posting of officers.”

The detailed letter was addressed to Director Settlement Survey and Land Records Sharjeel Noor Channa. It sets out the facts from correspondence exchanged between revenue officers and the director’s office since last year, which began in December 2025.

The deputy commissioner’s inquiry found that letter No 705 of Nov 13, 2025, issued in the name of the Land Records Officer (LRO) on the form’s restoration, was declared “fake, fabricated, managed and not issued by LRO’s office” in a later letter, No LRO/875 of Dec 5, 2025.

The deputy commissioner’s office then received another letter, No LRO/925 of Dec 30, 2025. The additional deputy commissioner-I (ADC-I) forwarded it to the director for verification, as is the usual practice, and the director’s administrative officer wrote on Feb 27, 2026, that it was genuine.

Because the annexures to LRO/925 were unattested, the ADC-I personally took up the matter with the director. In response, the administrative officer issued another letter on March 9, 2026, along with the LRO’s report of March 5, declaring LRO/925 “fake, fabricated and managed and not issued by his office”. “This made everything more dubious,” the deputy commissioner said.

The director’s office has the authority to issue and cancel a Ghat Wadh Form. The deputy commissioner wrote the July 10 letter after revenue officials found irregularities in the restoration of the form for 229 acres and 12 guntas of government land. He also told the director that a paragraph of the Sindh High Court’s order of Sept 15, 2017, reproduced in the LRO’s Dec 30, 2025 communication to the AC Latifabad, appeared “unclear and vague”.

The letter asked the director to initiate an inquiry and to proceed against the persons and officials involved in the repeated attempts through criminal and/or disciplinary proceedings under the policy guidelines. No inquiry has been started to date.

After examining the facts, the deputy commissioner told the director that the “matter is sensitive and involves valuable government land”. He added that the available record indicated that “certain individuals apparently acting in collusion with staff of your office, have repeatedly attempted with malafide intent to exploit periods of transition during officers’ postings and transfers”.

Mr Memon told Dawn on Friday that multiple attempts had recently been made to grab state land by erecting a boundary wall around it. He said several complaints had been received that the wall was being built illegally to occupy land reserved for, and mutated in favour of, other societies. In view of the legal position, he said, he would move a reference for cancellation of the earlier entry made on the basis of the now-cancelled Form-16.

Published in Dawn, October 3rd, 2026