Trade body concerned over land lease to CRPF
Srinagar: The Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI), Monday expressed concern at the decision of the Governor’s administration to lease out 60 kanals of land to the CRPF.
A spokesperson of the KCC&I stated that while on one hand the business community of the state was suffering due to the non-availability of land, “huge chunks of prime industrial land were being converted into camps and residential quarters for security forces.”
“The KCC&I is on record to have asked the government, time and again, to retrieve land wasted under the occupation of government Public Sector Undertakings (PSU’s) and make the same available for industrial/commercial use,” a statement said.
The KCCI said it “was surprising that the Government had instead recently announced that it was in the process of identification of land for creation of small Satellite Industrial Estates of around 40 kanals”.
“Already more than 300 kanals of land belonging to the Zainakote Industrial Estate was transferred to different wings of the State and Central Security Forces. This land was retrieved from the erstwhile Hindustan Machine Tools (HMT) group in the year 2017,” it added.
The decision to transfer land to the CRPF, the KCCI said, “also ignores the objections raised by City Planners in the just notified Master Plan- 2035 for the Srinagar Metropolitan Region”.
“It would be pertinent to reproduce portions of Para 7.6 of Page 69 of the Plan which read as under,” the KCCI said.
It said that as per the existing land use, the occupation of forces was spread over an area of 23.0 Sq km including many military and paramilitary establishments.
“The widespread existence of military and paramilitary establishments across Srinagar has actually surpassed its area under public infrastructure. The statistics reveal that there is more area occupied by defense use than the area used for the development of District, Divisional and State level public and semi-public infrastructure”.
The KCCI added that the “indiscriminate dispersal of defence establishments in every nook and corner of the city including the civilian areas is construed as a major impediment in city development”.
“Adopting the guidelines of the Ministry of Defense, the situation will become more grim causing undesirable strain on urban infrastructure,” it said.
The KCCI also threatened that it “would be considering approaching the Hon’ble High Court, if needed, in this regard”.
KV News
