Chandigarh August 12:
            After 13 years of trying to undo a “mistake”, the Punjab government has finally started the process of de-notifying over 55,000 hectares of land locked under the Punjab Land Preservation Act (PLPA) across five districts of Punjab.
The first set of notifications delisting the pockets under the PLPA in Karoran, Nadah and Perchh villages in SAS Nagar district were issued by the Forest Department today.
Interestingly, the department has started the delisting process from Chandigarh’s peripheral villages where most of the land under the PLPA is owned by VIPs, including politicians, bureaucrats and police officers. Sources add that the VIP lobby and the land mafia had been pressurising the government to undertake the de-listing of the forest land in Chandigarh’s periphery first and only after that take up the delisting of other areas.
Thousands of farmers in Ropar, Hoshiarpur and Gurdaspur who are unable to till their land due to it being locked under the PLPA are, however, still awaiting relief. Their turn, sources add, is likely to come within the next three years as the process of de-notifying was cumbersome and involved preparation of detailed khasra number lists. The source added that the de-listing of the PLPA is specific to certain pockets only in certain villages and it should not be thought that all land under the PLPA in Punjab has been denotified.
Most of this land falls in the eco-fragile zone and is notified under Sections IV and V of the PLPA 1900. The PLPA does not allow a host of activities, including construction. The move to denotify this land from the PLPA was initiated in 1997 when it was discovered that vast tracts of land under habitation and cultivation had been “wrongly” shown as forest land. The land was ordered to be delisted from the list of forest areas under Section 2 of the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980, by the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests in July last year.
The ministry has, however, laid down strict conditions on the delisting of land from the PLPA banning any form of commercial activity on this land. The land is to be used only for bonafide agricultural purposes and related activities to sustain the livelihood of the landowner. In September last year, a committee constituted by the department had recommended that the land be denotified from the PLPA and its control handed over to the Revenue Department. The government accepted the recommendations of the committee and it was decided that the de-notified areas be placed under the jurisdiction of the state authority that managed the land.
For instance, for Nadah and Karoran villages, which along with Kansal village form part of the Nayagaon notified area committee (NAC), the NAC will manage the de-notified land. “It will now be the duty of the Nayagaon NAC to ensure the implementation of the conditions laid down by the government of India for these pockets. In case they allow any activity other than agriculture on these chunks, they will be facing the ire of the steering committee of the Supreme Court,” pointed out a Forest Department official.