Government reclaims 302 ropanis of public land in Kathmandu

The government has brought 302 ropanis of public and government land in seven wards of Kathmandu under the name of the Government of Nepal, acting on a report a high-level commission submitted three decades ago. The land lies in wards 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 12 and 29 of Kathmandu Metropolitan City, according to the secretariat of Pratibha Rawal, Minister for Land Management, Cooperatives, Federal Affairs and General Administration, as reported by Onlinekhabar, Nagarik News, Annapurna Post and Newspolar.

The move implements the 2052 BS (1995-96) report of the High-Level Commission for the Investigation and Protection of Government and Public Land, commonly known as the Rawal Commission. The commission studied the state of government and public land and recommended protecting plots that had been encroached upon or registered in individuals' names. The ministry has begun acting on that report only now, decades later.

Implementation process

To carry out the report, the Ministry of Land Management, Cooperatives, Federal Affairs and General Administration formed a committee led by Chief Survey Officer Ramesh Gyawali. Its members include under-secretaries from the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and Transport, the chiefs of the relevant land administration and survey offices, the chief of the local level coordination branch and a section officer from the Department of Land Management and Records, with a survey officer from the Department of Survey as member-secretary.

Under the government's decision to protect the land the commission identified, the Land Administration Office in Dillibazar deducted the area the report marked as encroached from each affected plot and registered it in the government's name. According to the reports, the government has also begun investigating all the land the Rawal Commission identified, with a view to bringing it under government ownership.

The reports did not say who currently occupies the plots.