Bangladesh News

The river-grabbers get off scot-free for a section of crooked land officials and lack of sufficient records to detect documents forged to back up claims on land.

Land office sources said they only have a mouza map of the cadastral survey (CS), the first land survey that ended in 1940, at their disposal.

Though later some other surveys including revision survey (RS) and Dhaka survey were conducted, most of the maps do not tally.

Working on the issue, this correspondent spoke to several officials from the land survey department to know how the grabbers make do with fake documents.

“If the government does not acquire the land or register it as a personal lot, it will still be river on paper even if someone has a structure built there,” said Jahangir Kabir, in-charge of Dhaka settlement office, about grabbed river land.

“Surveying the Buriganga, we found numerous constructions on land shown as river in the CS map,” he added.

Land officials said that in the CS the plots adjoining the river were demarcated, but the width of the river was not specified.

So if somebody fills up a portion of the river and manages a land document number from CS map, it is difficult to expose the forgery.

“We have mouza maps delineating plots and fixing the size of land in each mouza (a definite land area with settlements). But most of the mouzas don’t have border pillars and don’t say at which point they start,” said a land official requesting anonymity.

“So if anyone grabs a portion of the river to stretch his riverside plot, it’s hard to prove his documents are phoney. To complicate matters further, there are a number of changes in the RS and Dhaka survey,” he said.

Due to manual record-keeping systems, it is not easy to find out if a document is fake or original.

So despite rampant forgery of land documents in collusion with land officials, the administrators can do little to stop encroachment on rivers.

All the ‘grabbers’ this correspondent has talked to claim they have documents to prove they have either purchased the land from somebody or inherited that from their forefathers.