Observing the growing population with unalloyed concern, Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), a British demographer and political economist, opined that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for human-beings. He also inferred that populations had a tendency to grow until the economically weaker sections suffered hardship, want and greater susceptibility to hunger and disease burden. According to him, the power of land to produce food being limited, the law of diminishing returns operated in the field of agriculture and the operation of this law prevented food production from increasing in proportion to capital invested on land. Given the unabating addition to the population of the country year after year on the cusp of outstripping the production of food, and more importantly the steady shrinking of per capita land for shelter, agriculture, industry, roads, green cover, lung space and basic infrastructure needed for governance, not only money worth of land is sky-rocketing but also the lay people are helplessly witnessing land-grabbing, euphemistically called encroachment all over the country, including the comparatively tranquil Mysuru city. Intermediaries, working with sponsorship of land-grabbers are having a field day, particularly in metropolises such as Bengaluru.

Lake-beds and lands on the fringes of once-lush forests have been encroached upon to the point of no return to their original state until not too long ago. Space alongside the country’s Railway lines, estimated to be a few hundred thousand square kilometres, have been encroached, mostly resulting in unauthorised construction of dwellings.

An emerging enterprise is faking land-related records of genuine owners of their residential sites, particularly those which have been left unused for a number of years. According to some keen observers of the goings on in urban space, residential sites commanding market value at unimaginable levels, often being talked about in crores of rupees, even possessing all the authentic records such as Urban Property Ownership Record (UPOR) as well as officially issued receipts by the urban local body annually for prompt payment of property tax doesn’t guarantee ownership rights, as the intermediaries are at their brilliant best in faking the documents, leaving the genuine owners of property aghast, particularly those who don’t have the money power or political clout to wrest their property by approaching either law-keepers or law-Courts.

While land-grabbers all over the country are proving a law unto themselves, encroachment of India’s territory by its hostile neighbours as well as areas figuring in inter-State disputes remaining unresolved are to be deemed as modern enterprise with stakes beyond calculation. Encroached lands everywhere have turned into nobody’s baby.