the goan I network
PANAJI
In what could kick up a major controversy, the Goa government is all but decided to take the Ordinance route and lend legal muscle for a plan to regularise illegal encroachments and constructions in comunidade jurisdictions across the State.
Revenue Minister Rohan Khaunte said the government will amend the law to regularise illegal constructions in comunidade lands after the ongoing process of regularising unauthorised constructions in private lands begins to take concrete shape.
“Efforts are underway to regularise constructions in comunidade lands. The act will be amended with an aim to benefit Goans and to add up revenue for government. The issue of constructions in government land will be taken up later,” Khaunte said.
Illegal constructions in government lands, in jurisdictions of various comunidades and also in forest areas are rampant in the State.
The government is saddled with thousands of claims to regularise constructions in forest areas and the Forest Rights Committees have already begun work to convey decisions on these claims.
Also, the process of regularising illegal or unauthorized constructions built in private lands before February 28, 2014, is already in progress.
This is not the first time that a government in Goa is putting the State’s might into regularizing encroachments in the jurisdiction of Comunidades, which are local community bodies with origins that date back to over a thousand years ago.
In the year 2000, during the tenure of the Francisco Sardinha government, a similar move to regularise illegal constructions in comunidade lands was attempted by current Panchayat Minister Mauvin Godinho, who was the Revenue Minister then. Godinho’s move, however, fizzled out due to legal challenges by the comunidades and lack of political will to pursue the controversial move, once the Sardinha government got dislodged. Presently, the government had been poised to enact a legislation to regularise illegal constructions in Comunidade lands during the recently concluded Monsoon Session of the Goa legislative assembly. It, however, got stuck due to paucity of time and other legal and technical reasons. Now, the government is thinking of passing an ordinance to give legal sanction to its plans.
Sources in the Revenue Department said, over 3,000 encroachments have been identified in Comunidade lands and the process of segregating them into categories based on the extent of illegalities involved, is on. At present, 357 encroachments in Central zone comunidades, 863 in North Zone comunidades and 1,689 encroachments in South Zone comunidades have already been documented, the sources said.
Rules will be framed to enable regularising certain category of illegal constructions and to take action against others, the Revenue Department sources said.
Meanwhile, the Revenue Department has in its records shown 3,121 encroachments in government lands in the State, mostly in rural areas.
After, BJP government was formed in 2012, Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar had promised to amend the laws and regularise illegal constructions. Following up on that promise, the administration first began with a process to regularise unauthorized constructions in private land.
Next on the government’s agenda now is to regularise constructions on Comunidade land.
