Why after all, concerned authorities feel ill at ease in taking the desired action and instead plant moves direct or indirect in ‘buying’ time in not evicting encroachers from one forest compartment situated in a Poonch village ? Two years have elapsed since this action should have been taken. It is strange that despite the Division Bench of the High Court headed by the Chief Justice terming the situation as deeply distressing , the authorities have not proceeded ahead with the job.
And the issue is not ordinary as it involves as much as 1400 kanals of forest land and how come Forest Department officials afford to sit over the matter even after the inhabitants of the village being compelled to knock at the doors of the High Court. Merely by serving soft eviction notices and ‘reminders’ against 127 persons who having thieved public (Forest) land and had no claim whatsoever over the grabbed land, needed effective and firm ways to have the land retrieved from them. We cannot put the encroachers into compartments of ‘genuine’ encroachers and ‘ungenuine’ encroachers as grabbers could never own a genuine title . However, the matter needed to be given priority and it must also be noted that only because of the apparent helplessness shown by the administration in such cases in initial stages, encroachers were getting emboldened and becoming immune with passage of time.
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