The Himachal Cabinet in its meeting on Tuesday decided to wave-off/remit the entire stamp duty as well as registration fee in favour of farmers for restoration of their mortgaged or auctioned land on clearance of the entire due amount to the bank under one time settlement.
This will facilitate the farmers to get back their sold or mortgaged land without additional burden of stamp duty and registration fee.
This has been done to provide relief to those distressed farmers whose land has been sold or ownership transferred in favour of the bank and recorded in revenue records. Since the revenue authorities were hard pressing for payment of stamp duty and registration fee, which some poor farmers were finding difficult to pay, hence a decision was taken to waive off stamp duty and registration fee in respect of those farmers who are availing benefit of One Time Settlement scheme to facilitate transfer of their land in their names.
The meeting presided over by Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh also decided to give incentive/award in shape of grand-in-aid to the Panchayati Raj bodies who elected all the office-bearers un-opposed and to the Panchayats who return their office-bearers un-opposed.
The incentive, amount would be Rs5 lakh, Rs10 lakh and Rs15 lakh for gram panchayats, Panchayat Samitis and Zila Parishads respectively. The Cabinet also gave approval for relaxing the norm of 100 metres from the road head for allotment of land up to 3 biswa in rural areas and 2 biswa in urban areas for construction of dwelling units as per the housing policy of the State Government to the urban and rural landless persons. It is expected to benefit large number of landless persons both in urban and rural areas.
Decision was taken unanimously to constitute State Monitoring Committee under the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in land Acquisition Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 with Financial Commissioner Revenue of GoHP as its Chairman besides 11 other members and a member Secretary.