KATHMANDU, Oct 5: Prime Minister Balendra Shah has said the government has so far distributed land ownership certificates to 5,737 families as part of efforts to resolve longstanding landlessness and squatter settlement problems.
In a social media post on Monday, Shah said the government aims to resolve the problems of landless squatters within 1,000 days by making land reform a priority.
Shah said the issue of landlessness had remained unresolved for seven decades despite repeated commitments by successive governments. He noted that the Nepali Congress had pledged to prioritize landless farmers in its election manifesto for the 1959 parliamentary election, but the problem persisted through the Panchayat, multiparty democratic and republican periods.
Almost 1.5 million squatter families apply for land ownership c...
According to Shah, successive governments have formed commissions, committees and other structures and conducted studies to address land-related problems, but implementation has repeatedly stalled. He said the state spent more than Rs 2 billion on such structures between 2020 and last year alone, without producing the expected results.
“The structures established to solve the problem themselves appeared to become obstacles to solving it,” Shah said.
He said the current government was moving ahead based on expertise, coordination with local governments and clear responsibilities rather than political appointments and unnecessary layers, in line with its pre-election commitments.
Shah said the Land Problem Resolution Commission has begun collecting and processing land-related data nationwide through an integrated system. A total of 1,311,197 applications have so far been registered in the system, and their review and verification are underway.
He said land ownership registration certificates have already been distributed to 5,737 families across various districts, including landless Dalits, landless squatters, informal settlers and families occupying land without ownership certificates.
Shah said the distribution of the certificates marked an initial step and that the process would now be expanded rapidly across the country.
