Action in Roshni land scheme in ‘surgical strike’: Former Dy CM
Jammu: A day after the Jammu and Kashmir administration announced its plan to annul all actions taken under the Roshni scheme and retrieve the land under it, BJP leader Kavinder Gupta on Sunday said this is a “surgical strike” against the corrupt who “usurped priceless chunks of state land at dirt-cheap rates”.
The administration on Saturday had said that it would annul all actions and also cancel all mutations, besides retrieving the land under the scheme within six months.
The decision was taken three weeks after the Jammu and Kashmir High Court ordered a CBI probe into an alleged scam in the Roshni land scheme.
“Declaring the Roshni land scheme null and void, and subsequently initiating a time-bound process for retrieving encroached land from illegal beneficiaries is the BJP-led government’s surgical strike against the corrupt of Jammu and Kashmir who usurped priceless chunks of state land at dirt-cheap rates,” Gupta, a former deputy chief minister, said in a statement.
The scheme initially envisaged conferment of proprietary rights of around 20.55 lakh kanals of land to occupants of which 15.85 percent of land was approved for vesting of ownership rights.
But against the expected revenue from such occupants, the revenue actually generated was meagre, thereby failing to realise the objective of the scheme that was finally repealed by Satya Pal Malik, the former governor of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, on November 28, 2018.
On October 09, a division bench of Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice Rajesh Bindal ordered the CBI probe into irregularities in the scheme and directed the agency to file a status report every eight weeks.
Gupta accused the National Conference (NC), the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the Congress of inducing the “slow poison” of demographic change through the scheme.
“The BJP will fight tooth and nail to fail the nefarious design of the NC for carrying out land jihad in Jammu and Kashmir,” he said.
