Ghaziabad: Around 75 acres — and not 1,061 — of land identified by the government as enemy property in Sikri Khurd of Modinagar will be taken over by the Union home ministry, the district administration has said.On October 12, chief minister Yogi Adityanath had asked district magistrate RK Singh to sort out the issue of enemy property at the earliest. In April last year, a survey by the district administration had identified 1,061 acres as enemy property.It was dubbed so because the survey found that the lands original owner — Allaudin — had moved to Pakistan after the Partition in 1947 and made the country his home. According to the Enemy Property Act of 1968, such land or property is to be taken over by the Union home ministrys Custodian of Enemy Property for India department and the families living there have to be evicted.This led to a protest by thousands of residents who had built homes on the land after Allaudin left it. According to an estimate, around 27,000 small houses had come up in the area. After some residents moved the Allahabad high court late last year, it asked the Ghaziabad administration to send individual notices to the residents and ordered a fresh survey. This fresh study is still under process, but the district administration has scaled down the area of dispute for now, hoping the protests will end.Yes, the Allahabad high court has ordered a fresh survey. In the meantime, we have downsized the enemy property land from 1,061 to 75 acres, an administrative official said.Most of the newly identified land, the official said, included roads, ponds and fields. So, the number of families who would be affected if the Centre takes over the 75 acres has reduced from 25,000 to 2,000.The villagers, who have been protesting for the past couple of months, seemed somewhat relieved.We believe the chief minister, during his visit to Ghaziabad last week, asked the district administration to scale down the size of enemy property. This will affect fewer people now as most of the land includes ponds and fields, said Babli Nagar, who is spearheading the protest.Nagar, who owns a house in Sikri Khurd, however, alleged that the administration should have taken into account the Zamindari Abolition Act before declaring any plot as enemy property. These land parcels have been sold several times over the past decades. After the Zamindari Abolition Act came into force, there was a provision in the law that the then custodian of land would be allowed to retain the land after paying ten times the revenue. The original custodian of land or property exists in the revenue records and yet the district administration, while conducting a survey, overlooked it and unilaterally declared it as enemy property, Nagar said.DM Singh had earlier said that it was the home ministry that had ordered the survey to monetise the land.

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