Early Times Report
JAMMU, June 9: The Jammu Kashmir Sharnarthi Action Committee (JKSAC) has urged Lt. Governor Manoj K. Sinha to issue an advisory to the Secretary of the Department of Disaster Management, Relief, Rehabilitation, and Reconstruction (DMRRR) to include the remaining over 4,000 families of Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (POJK) Displaced Persons (DPs) in the Prime Minister's relief package. These families were left out of the package due to the lack of mandatory requirements needed to establish their DP status.
The JKSAC has been representing this issue to the concerned administration for a considerable period of time, but a decision has been pending for the past 2½ years. They have appealed to Lt. Governor Sinha to intervene and take up the matter of the final settlement of DPs with the Honorable Prime Minister and Home Minister, as recommended by the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) on Home Affairs.
The JKSAC demands that supplementary records of the left-out bonafide DP families, such as camp ration cards, revenue extracts of their allotted lands, copies of register cancellation, land records of their native places in POJK, and other relevant documents, be included in the mandatory list. This would allow them to avail the benefits of the relief assistance provided to DPs under the Prime Minister's Development Package 2015 (PMDP-2015) by the Government of India.
Gurdev Singh, the President of JKSAC, addressed a meeting of DPs in Purkho Domana, Jammu, and informed the participants that ex-gratia relief assistance was sanctioned by the Government of India under PMDP-2015 for a total of 36,384 families, including 10,065 families of Chamb DPs from 1965 and 1971. Out of the 26,319 POJK DP families, relief has been disbursed to approximately 20,000 families. The cases of about 1,500 families are currently being reprocessed for ex-gratia relief by the PRO Jammu, which were earlier stopped due to the sudden closure of the scheme by the Ministry of Home Affairs in February 2022. However, over 4,000 POJK families have not been considered for payment of ex-gratia relief due to missing or damaged mandatory requirements/records, which is a result of negligence by the concerned administrative department of the government.
Singh further stated that the supplementary records of these left-out families, as mentioned earlier, are available in the record room of PRO Jammu, and the land records of their native places in POJK are available in the record rooms of the districts of Poonch and Baramula, respectively. Certified copies of these supplementary records, which are sufficient to identify their DP status, can be obtained from the respective government record rooms. |
