Hyderabad: Revenue officials in the city are facing difficulties in identifying land owned by the Wakf Board due to lack of gazette notifications, schedules and sketches. The revenue department took up the field level verification of Wakf land after instructions from the government following the seizure of the Wakf Board office about one-and-a-half month ago. The focus is on identifying vacant Wakf land parcels, those with permanent structures, land under encroachment and those on which there is litigation. The revenue staff is also identifying the tenure of occupancy in cases of encroachments.
A few tahsildars said data was missing on land in some cases. They found that instead of 714 Wakf assets in Bandlaguda mandal, the mandal revenue office has records for 140. It is believed that the records of the other assets could be in neighboring mandals of Hyderabad and Ranga Reddy districts.
In Saidabad, out of 175 assets, 125 are under the jurisdiction of the mandal revenue office and the remaining are under Amberpet and Charminar mandals. An official source said that the revenue wing had identified 247 encroachments in Hyderabad division out of 3,100 assets of Wakf and 31 encroachments in Secunderabad division out of 403 properties. When Hyderabad collector Yogita Rana asked officials about the impediments they were facing, the tahsildars, village revenue officers and village revenue assistants said that the problem was with the nonavailability of records.
