LAHORE: The Pakistan Railways has retrieved 1,184 acres encroached railway land so far with the help of district and railways police during the current regime on the direction of Railways Minister Khawaja Saad Rafique.
The Pakistan Railways Spokesman told APP on Saturday that a total 3,721 acre land had been recovered after introducing the recovery policy. He said that 45.829 acres land had been recovered in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK), 946.039 acres in Punjab, 182.936 acres in Sindh and 9.316 acres in Balochistan.
In first step, a detailed survey was carried out to identify the details of encroached land, occupied by individual encroachers and by some government departments, and then an anti-encroachment campaign was started under the supervision of divisional superintendents of the railways with the help of the Railways police, he said.
“A comprehensive policy was formed to prevent further encroachments under which Pakistan Railway field officers/ officials and Railway police officials would jointly be responsible in case of any new encroachment,” he added. The spokesman said that FIRs were being lodged and cases were sent to Railway judicial Magistrates for expeditious trial.”Under current anti-encroachment campaign as many as 3,993 cases were registered and 4,333 accused were arrested”, he said.
From which around 2,361 cases had been decided by the courts so far, while the accused involved in 2,318 cases were convicted, whereas 43 accused were acquitted by the courts and 158 cases were under investigation, he added.
He said that the issue regarding illegal occupation or possession of the PR land by any government departments had been taken up with departments concerned. The spokesman said a project for computerization of railway land record was initiated during April 2015 with the assistance of Urban Unit in order to synchronize railway land record with the record of all provincial revenue departments. This project was about to complete and this program would ensure protection of railway land through a computerized monitoring system, he added.
