Today in Srinagar, PDP Chief Spokesperson Syed Suhail Bukhari voiced rising worries over the land to landless initiative and urged for more openness from the government on the scheme’s aims and effects.
When discussing the land for the landless programme with the media, Bukhari stressed the need of transparency. He emphasised that the public’s mistrust in the government’s motives for the programme was growing with each passing day and new events around the strategy. The PDP Chief Spokesperson highlighted the policy’s inclusion of domiciles as beneficiaries as one of its qualifying requirements. He brought up an important issue that has to be resolved: who exactly lives in these houses. He said that the group knew of countless cases in which non-state persons were issued residence certificates.
According to the PDP leader, this raises the issue of whether the people who have recently been accepted as domiciles are indeed locals or foreigners who have been given domicile status. He argued that the government should be more open with the public. Bukhari insisted that the facts needed to make this decision, including the number of non-state subjects who have been awarded residence status, must be made public. He encouraged the administration to be clean about how many foreign nationals will be counted as residents under the new policy. The government’s top spokesperson voiced alarm about the fallout from recent decisions.
