Over 2,000 illegal hutments to be demolished at Chandola lake in Ahmedabad

Speaking to The Indian Express on the demolitions around Chandola lake, Municipal Commissioner Banchha Nidhi Pani said, “More than 2,000 residential encroachments will be removed and it will vacate more than 1.25 lakh sq m of land. More than 50 bulldozers and trucks accompanied by 500 estate department staffers along with medical staffers, fire department staffers and those from other departments are working at the scene. It has been carried out legally because water bodies are considered sacrosanct and cannot be encroached upon by any means.”

Commissioner of Police Gyanender Singh Malik said on Monday that everyone was a land-grabber in the area, where the police crackdown took place at 3 am on April 26.

“Legally speaking, everyone who is staying in that area has been staying in something that is illegally constructed which means it is land-grabbing,” he told The Indian Express.

A panic began at 7 pm on Monday, when the AMC parked bulldozers outside the area in anticipation of the upcoming action. Even as senior police officials remained incommunicado and Deputy Municipal Commissioner Riddhesh Raval of the estate department claimed ignorance of any such action, residents who had been released from detention after being verified as Indian citizens rushed to the nearby Isanpur police station to plead for time, but no officer was reportedly available to meet them.

Early on Tuesday morning, the bulldozers began to roll into Bengalivaas in Siyasatnagar inside the Chandola Talav na Chhapra. Locals said they had no idea how many hutments had been demolished but several people were seen packing their valuables on handcarts and cycle-carts and moving out of the area as the bulldozers moved in.

The encroachments have been removed between the greater and smaller Chandola lakes, which Municipal Commissioner Pani termed critical. He said, “Since 2010, we have seen continuous encroachment on the lake. Because the water was being stopped and the capacity of the lake was being reduced further.”

Crime Branch officials said they had destroyed a large bungalow of alleged land encroacher and slumlord Lalu Pathan alias Lalu Bihari and his son Fatehmahmood Lalu Pathan. Both of them were detained by the police.

There are largely two types of illegal constructions civic bodies have to deal with. One is illegal additions made to buildings on privately owned land and the other is illegal structures built on government land. The action at Chandola Talav na Chhapra is of the second kind, where government land—the three interconnected Chandola lakes in Ahmedabad’s Danilimda area—was encroached on.

Such operations, where police action is followed by a crackdown by the municipal authorities, are part of the whole-of-government approach taken against anti-social elements across Gujarat following violence in the Vastral area of Ahmedabad on Holi (March 13), when 14 miscreants went on a rampage with sticks and swords, hitting random people and destroying property on the roads.

On Monday, DGP Vikas Sahay gave an account of the action carried out thus far, stating that the police had prepared a list of 7,157 anti-social elements across the state since the crackdown initiated in March.

“The Gujarat police has been conducting a strict drive against anti-social elements… Last month, all district police departments and city commissionerates were asked to prepare a list of anti-social elements within 100 hours. The list was prepared and action initiated as per the provisions of the law… About 7,157 persons have been identified and classified as anti-social… In coordination with various institutions, 372 demolitions of illegal structures have been initiated against these persons while 1,046 electricity connections have been snapped in coordination with the utility providers,” Sahay said.