While Nazul Bill Is In Cold Storage, Yogi Adityanath Has Plan B To Tackle Land Mafias In Uttar Pradesh

While the Nazul land bill has been deferred for now due to objections raised by various Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders, Uttar Pradesh (UP) Chief Minister (CM) Yogi Adityanath has kept his focus on dealing with land mafias.

Nazul land is the land that the Indian government inherited from the erstwhile British government. Despite being government land, it is not directly administered by the government and is under private ownership in several places.

In many places, land mafias have taken over these land parcels. The intention of the Nazul Properties (Management and Utilisation for Public Purposes) Bill 2024 was to free these land parcels from mafias and use them for development purposes.

However, it was pointed out that the bill can be misused to evict poor people who have been living on the Nazul land for over a century, and hence, it was sent to the select committee by the UP legislative council for consideration.

While the bill has been stalled for now, the Adityanath administration has started working on finding records of the Nazul land. However, only 30 per cent of the records could be found because they are 128 years old, Amar Ujala reported.

Most Nazul lands are in the districts of Prayagraj, Lucknow, Varanasi, Kanpur, Ayodhya, Sultanpur, Gonda, and Barabanki. They are believed to cover a total area of 15,000 hectares, as per a 2020 land management report.

The administration fears that most of these land parcels have been taken over by land mafias, and their records have been hidden or tampered with deliberately. Hence, a new report based on the geographical survey will be prepared.

In Kanpur, Nazul land parcels are estimated to be worth Rs 80,000 crore because they are located in posh areas of Civil Lines and VIP roads. Many of these land parcels have non-operational mills, and people live in them.

The government now plans to take these land parcels and make housing facilities for the poor people living here. The land is also planned to be used for parking purposes through underground and multi-level parking structures.

The Adityanath administration is also concerned about pollution in Kanpur and, hence, wants to pursue forestation on some of the land parcels. Other land parcels will be landscaped and used to develop tourist attractions in the city.

Kanpur is just one example. The other cities, especially in eastern UP, also have large parcels of Nazul land and have been taken over by land mafias. These land parcels have huge potential to be used for development purposes.

However, before bringing the bill back into consideration, the Adityanath government needs to devise a plan for differentiating between land mafias and the poor while taking over the Nazul land.

If the poor people lose the land they have been living on for a century, it will become another political issue, harming the BJP's electoral prospects in the state ahead of the by-polls for 10 assembly seats and the 2027 UP election.

Already, the alleged highhandedness of bureaucrats has cost BJP seats, as per review reports, in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, as the party came down to 33 of the state's 80 seats from 62 in 2019. The Nazul bill will provide another opportunity for bureaucrats.