Plan to evict land-grabbers

There is no doubt that land-grabbing and illegal occupation of land is one of the most serious problems facing the administration today, and we are gratified to see that the standing committee seems set to finally address the issue. However, we are not so sure that Rab is at all the correct law enforcement authority to bring in to tackle the matter.

It is unclear to us what role is envisaged for Rab by the standing committee. The best we can understand is that once government land has been identified Rab will be put in charge of carrying out the eviction of those who are found to be squatting unlawfully on the land.

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This approach is flawed in a number of important respects. The first one is that there seems to be no good reason why regular law enforcement authorities cannot accomplish this task. The question which immediately springs to mind is whether the government will first bother to go through all the legal processes necessary before eviction, such as going to court, providing due notice and conducting the eviction in a legally permissible manner, and particularly in the case of squatters, with a humane touch.

Bringing Rab into the picture might lead some to wonder whether the authorities now wish to dispense with the niceties of due process in the matter of evictions as well as in the matter of fighting crime.

The main deficiency, though, of the proposed plan is that it does not acknowledge that the bulk of the land problem in Bangladesh is not the impoverished masses who squat on government land because they have no place else to go, but the rich and powerful who have fraudulently obtained title to land or control land they have no right or title to.