The Army is fighting a battle to retain its own land that is being encroached upon by squatters right in the heart of the military cantonment area.
Around 12,000 acre of defence land across the country has been encroached upon. Secunderabad/Hyderabad has one of the largest Army cantonments in the country, and the encroachment here is due to a number of reasons.
During Operations Pawan and Parakram, the cantonment area was more or less devoid of troops. “In the absence of the fighting troops, the encroachers had a field day and not only did they start erecting unlawful structures on the land belonging to the military, they also prepared fake documents,” an Army official told Deccan Chronicle.
The trespassers then sold pieces of the land in multiple transactions, paying the registration fee several times to lend credibility to the title deeds. The infringement of defence land also has a religious face here. The same official disclosed how a small photograph of a god or goddess planted on a piece of land justifies the erection of a full-fledged temple to the deity, which brings an attendant rush of devotees, sanctifying the place as a sacred one that cannot be touched.
“Then, vendors first set up kiosks, followed by makeshift structures, followed by roofed ones,” the official alleged.
Even bungalows and other residential buildings, given by the British Army on a 30-90 year lease, continue to be occupied by those who should have vacated them long ago.
“Ideally these properties should have been returned to us in unaltered form. But many have been put to commercial use as well,” said the official and added that the Army has been fighting several cases in the civil courts for the past so many years to regain control of its properties.
It doesn’t help that the office of the local registration authority has been shifted from Shamirpet to Medchal.
"There have been frequent changes in offices and officials, long spells when the army's presence here was insignificant and then the cantonment having open borders with no fencing also resulted in the infringement of army land," said an official.