Gaighat, June 19
Police today arrested Udayapur District Land Survey Office surveyor Shivachandra Thakur in connection with a recent land fraud when a strip of land appropriated for road expansion was sold for millions of rupees.
Earlier, police had arrested locals Shiva Prasad Dahal, his son Buddhi Prasad of Triyuga Municipality in Udayapur district and Nepal Dangol of Lalitpur district.
They were arrested after it came to light that the father and son had managed to sell a land plot now under the ambit of the road project in Motigada of Triyuga Municipality, by claiming it as their personal property.
Though the land on the Kadamaha-Gaighat section of Sagarmatha Highway was under the ownership of the Dahal family initially, it came under the area of the road project ever since the government decided to appropriate the land for expansion of Kadamaha-Gaighat road section.
But with the document-based formality to hand over the land to the road authorities still pending, the Dahals had managed to pass off the part of the road as their own property and sell it for a whopping 12.72 million rupees to Dangol. The land was transferred to Dangol’s ownership on May 30.
A version of this article appears in print on June 20, 2018 of The Himalayan Times.