MAPUSA: The people who have been affected by land grabbing have now urged the authorities not to endanger their lives and to restore the integrity and credibility of the village.
Badem-Assagao and Anjuna are the most affected villages where as many as 45 cases of land grabbing have come to light and affected people are mostly senior citizens, whose properties have been grabbed by manipulations and forging documents. These elderly people some of them living alone have become victims of the land grabbers.
Eighty-year-old Eliterio Carvalho, living alone in his house was robbed of his three properties. Grown old he is suffering from short term memory loss and taking advantage of this, the fraudsters allegedly grabbed his three properties.
When contacted, Carvalho said that he does not remember everything but is aware that his three properties have been fraudulently transferred. Two years ago his first property was allegedly grabbed by Branca Cassiana Diniz and Antoneta Fernandes family and this matter is now subjudice as civil matter is pending before the court.
Adv Augustus Monteiro, one of the members of a group helping the affected people said, “All the properties are acquired fraudulently in two ways, first by entering deeds in the Archives department supposedly done in 1951 and also by registering sale deeds in the Sub-Registrar office, Mapusa.”
While Succession deeds are drawn in Canacona and based on Succession deeds fraudulently the mutations have been completed and while doing this, no mutation procedures are followed nor the mutation rules are followed and names have been transferred.
Stating that people are suffering due to forgery and also they have to fight litigations in the court, Adv Monteiro appealed to concerned departments to look into the matter urgently and to revert back all the properties to rightful owners and to initiate criminal action against the culprits.
Juliet Monteiro, another affected resident of Assgao said that in her case sale of deed was done when she was not born. “This Property was bought by my grandfather and for last 90 years, it is in the possession of our family since generations and we have been looking after it. But the property is now fraudulently transferred where they even managed to complete the mutation and deleted the names from Form 1 & 14 ie my mother’s name, who is very much alive and is 84, my sister and myself but it has been portrayed that we are dead and one of the fraudsters had inherited the property from them.
“This deed of sale is done when I was not even born. My mother has been portrayed to be my sister and we are supposed to the children of my grandfather. Generations are skipped and then it’s shown that we all three are dead when we are still alive”, Juliet said.
“For me it is shocking because when my father died and we filed Inventory Proceedings to transfer the property from my father to my mother and we two sisters, it took us nearly a year to do the paper work but these fraudsters were able to complete the procedure within a month. So definitely there is lot of people involved in this and we hope to solve this issue ASVP and provide relief to all the affected people”, Juliet said.
