Land grabbing

The land grabbers are very active in and around the city where they control four lakh acres of land, while the government has only one lakh acre in its possession. Obviously, the problem has not arisen overnight, and only years, or decades, of poor land management could have created a situation in which the government has lost possession of its own land -- a big drain on national resources.

Another point is that successive governments did virtually nothing to ensure that government land was not grabbed. Else, the situation would have been different today. Worse still, most of the upazilas are running without assistant commissioner of land -- a key government official in the land management sector.

Tap here to add The Daily Star as a trusted source

So, not only the government has lost land to grabbers, the existing administrative set-up also does not appear to be ready to do much to recover the same.

The parliamentary standing committee's report, which contradicts a recent study on the issue, has actually confirmed that government land has been grabbed on a much larger scale than perceived generally, though it is not easy to explain how this could happen.

However, the government's task is to recover the land and thus put an end to an illegal business. Legal complications might arise in many cases, but nothing should deter the government from recovering the public property which has been lost due to gross mismanagement and neglect on the part of its custodians. It might already have been too late, but swooping on the lawbreakers is still the only option that the government can consider.