GUWAHATI, Nov 1 � Dispur has issued a warning to the civil as well as police administration asking them to act tough on land grabbers even if that involve a section of senior police and district administration officials.
The State Government, according to a well-placed source, is likely to issue a note in writing in a day or two to the Director General of Police and the Deputy Commissioners of all the districts asking them to suggest ways to fight the menace.
Dispur, it has been reliably learnt, would also assess the performance of the two task forces set up by the Kamrup (Metro) district administration around a year back to tackle the rising instances of land grabbing.
This comes in the wake of the arrest of Pramod Sarma, Deputy Superintendent of Police (River) along with seven others on Saturday on charges of conspiring abduction, which investigators have sought to link with a plot of land.
The arrest based on prima facie evidence has once again brought to the fore the need to explore the nexus between the police and the land mafias.
As far as land grabbing is concerned, though the task forces set up by Ashutosh Agnihotri during his earlier stint as the Deputy Commissioner, Kamrup (Metro) intensified operations against land grabbers, Agnihotri�s immediate transfer from the post had changed the complexion of the motivation for which the forces were constituted.
�Though the problem earlier largely revolved around developed areas like Guwahati, various other districts of the State have now started bearing the brunt, which has become a cause of serious concern,� the source at Dispur said, conceding that steps taken so far to fight land grabbing have not been able to fetch the desired results.
�The allegation of police-mafia nexus is not new. Involvement of district administration officials, besides others, has also surfaced time and again. The Government is for effective implementation of the law,� the source pointed out. Assam, in the last one decade, has witnessed a sharp rise in the number of cases relating to crime against property.
