As the Balendra Shah-led government decided to take action based on a decades-old report on the encroachment of government and public land, curiosity has grown over how the document was compiled and what it found.

On December 31, 1992, when Girija Prasad Koirala was prime minister, the government formed a high-level commission to investigate and protect government and public land amid rising complaints of encroachment. The initiative was led by then-land reforms minister Jagannath Acharya.

Samar Bahadur Singh, now 63, was a non-gazetted first-class officer at the Ministry of Land Reform at that time. He recalls that complaints had reached the Koirala Cabinet that during the 1986 resurvey, several government and public plots that had not been marked as private property in the earlier survey were registered in the names of individuals and land ownership certificates issued. Following these complaints, Koirala directed the land reform minister to investigate the matter.

Following the directive, Acharya formed a commission chaired by assistant minister Siddha Raj Ojha. The commission worked for about six months. However, before it could complete its task, Acharya resigned amid internal disputes within the Nepali Congress.

After Acharya’s resignation, Siddha Raj Ojha was promoted to minister of state. He then constituted an empowered high-level commission led by Ram Bahadur Rawal, a former land reform secretary and expert in administrative affairs. The commission set up its office at Charkhal Adda in Dillibazar, Kathmandu.

According to Singh, teams were formed under undersecretary Hari Prasad Aryal from the administration wing of the ministry. Technical squads were created with survey officers, surveyors and field surveyors for on-site inspections and measurements, while a separate administrative team drawn from land revenue offices handled record verification and evidence collection.

Singh recalls that five to six teams were deployed in the field every day. “Every day, 25 to 26 people were out in the field,” he said. “The report was drafted based on the measurements taken during these field visits.”

To determine how much government and public land across Kathmandu’s wards had been encroached upon, field teams cross-checked cadastral maps and field books from 1965 and 1985. Singh says the teams identified plot boundaries, ownership patterns and cases of encroachment by comparing historical records with ground reality.

They examined land categories including roads, footpaths, drains, canals, ponds, stone spouts, wells, rivers, riverbeds, schools, temples and cemeteries, documenting where encroachment had occurred and by how much.

Singh, who was involved in both the field operations and drafting, said survey teams measured plots on the ground using tapes to compare actual landholdings with official records. “We calculated exactly how much encroachment or overlap had occurred and categorised the data ward by ward,” he said. He added that the study also examined encroachment by government and semi-government bodies.

The findings were submitted to the Ministry of Land Reform, then located at Putali Bagaincha, where the new parliament building is being constructed.

Baburam Acharya, a survey officer with the commission who later became director general of the Department of Survey, said the report was prepared through comparisons of old and new maps along with field inspections and scrutiny of land records and survey documents at land revenue offices.

Singh says individual reports were prepared for each of Kathmandu’s then 35 wards. The master copy, kept at the Land Administration Division of the ministry, contained ward-wise dossiers signed by commission chair Ram Bahadur Rawal, under-secretary Hari Prasad Aryal and survey officials involved in field inspections.

Prepared over two years, the commission submitted its report in December 1995. It found that 1,859 ropani, 14 ana and 3 paisa (around 94.5 hectares) of land had been encroached upon.

Following the submission, the Cabinet decided to freeze land transactions on the identified plots to implement the recommendations. Singh says the report was sent to land revenue offices in Dillibazar, Kalanki and Chabahil, as well as survey offices. The original copy remained at the then Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reform.

He says there were three earlier attempts to implement the report, but enforcement was only partial. In the years that followed, land revenue staff checked transactions against the Rawal Commission report to identify flagged plots. However, Singh says the practice gradually weakened.

“Later, as new staff joined, the practice of checking the report declined,” he said. “Because of that, land that should have been frozen may have been bought and sold.”

Asked how the government should proceed now, Singh said authorities must first determine how much land has already been brought back under government ownership and how much remains encroached. He said the Land Revenue Office should lead recovery efforts.

The report has also drawn attention from constitutional and legal bodies over the years. On May 26, 2010, the Supreme Court issued a directive ordering the government to implement the Rawal Commission report.

The Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA) also later showed interest in pursuing the case against alleged land mafias. However, implementation stalled due to political pressure, administrative inertia and alleged collusion by powerful land interests, and the file eventually remained dormant within government offices.