In a first of its kind campaign to end the nagging land related issues in the rural areas, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has launched the special ‘varasat’ drive which aims at ending the exploitation of villagers in the name of natural succession of land and property.
This will not only end the long-pending land disputes but also put a check on the land mafia who generally target disputed lands especially in the rural areas. The new initiative is expected to settle cases pending for years in the 1,08,000 revenue villages of the state.
The villagers also feel that the campaign, which was started by the Yogi government on December 15, will not only help in ending the land disputes but also put a check on the irresponsible behaviour of lekhpals who generally do not take interest in these matters and are ignorant towards land disputes.
It is also to be mentioned that on every Tehsil Divas, most of the complaints are cases related to land disputes and in the police stations also most of the cases and complaints in the rural areas are related to land disputes.
The main reason for such disputes is at the level of lekhpal who does not take timely decisions on matters of land and is generally ignorant towards issues related to land. Because of this, the villagers keep taking rounds of his office and it is after much difficulty and efforts that their names get registered in the government documents. Due to this tedious exercise, many villagers give up the idea of `varasat’ and most of them, who are generally farmers, do not get loans from banks.
This is also the main reason for the disputes within families and relatives and a majority of villagers also face lawsuits that sometimes continue for generations.
To overcome these difficulties, the Yogi government has come up with a scheme in which the villagers will not have to go to the government offices and instead the officials of the Revenue department will approach them and take their applications online. With this system, the villagers will not be exploited at any level and can get their names registered in the land records (khatauni).
Under the arrangements made on the instructions of the chief minister, the people will get both online and offline facilities for registering the varasat. For the people who have land in the village but are living at some other place, a special counter will be opened at the tehsil level where they can apply for the same.
Besides this, the lekhpal will also visit the villages and verify the successors of the people who are dead and assist them in filing the application online.
Besides this, the government is also giving the facility to people to apply from community facility centres. In addition, a helpline is also being launched for assisting people who face any kind of difficulty in filing the application.
Under the campaign, all the information related to the varasat’ will also be uploaded on the website of the Revenue Board based on which the progress of the scheme will be reviewed.
At the end of this two-month scheme, the district magistrate, at the district and the tehsil level, will randomly identify 10 percent of the revenue village randomly and check the facts given in the report of the lekhpal through the sub-divisional magistrates, additional district magistrates and other district level officers.