After suffering a huge blow in the recent Lok Sabha elections and municipal polls mainly on the issue of land acquisition, the Left Front government is now going through a war within on the issue of unused land.

The state Land Department has asked all the other departments to return the 30,000 acres of land, which it had given to them but is still lying unused. “We are trying to retrieve the land but I don’t think we will be successful in doing that,” Minister for Land Reforms Abdur Rezaq Mollah had said in the Assembly last week.

Notwithstanding the minister’s pessimism, the commissioner general of land reforms, P K Agarwal, has written to the principal secretaries of all the state departments to hand over the unused land lying with them.

“There is a severe dearth of land all around. While it has become a bone of contention between the ruling party and the Opposition, many state government departments and in some cases some Central government departments are sitting over prime, high quality lands. It’s a matter of concern as they don’t want to part with their land,” one Land Department official told The Indian Express.

The department of panchayat has already replied to the Land Department saying that it has no unused land at its disposal.

While Durgapur Steel Plant has 750 acres of unused land, 2,000 acres of land belonging to West Bengal Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation are lying unused at Bolpur in Birbhum district.

“We are taking up the matter with the concerned authorities. If our efforts fail we will take it up with the chief minister so that he can exert pressure on those departments,” the official added.

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