Awang Tengah (fourth left) presents the land title to an owner. Flanking him are Rosey and Penguang.
MIRI: The Sarawak government will continue implementing its new initiative on native customary rights (NCR) land perimeter survey despite being unfairly accused of attempting to seize the people’s land, says Datuk Amar Awang Tengah Ali Hasan.
The deputy chief minister said this is because the government has always recognised and safeguarded the people’s rights on NCR land, and will continue to do so.
“The NCR land survey effort is not a new thing as it has been implemented since the 1960s via various programmes such as Settlement Operation, Survey Part III Sarawak Land Code, and Traditional Village Survey, before we introduced the new NCR Land Survey Programme in 2010,” he said yesterday.
Awang Tengah stated this when officiating at the presentation of land titles under Section 18 of the Sarawak Land Code, as well as for Bumiputera Communal Reserve gazetted under Section 6 of the Code, to 336 recipients here yesterday.
He pointed out that the previous NCR land survey programme was found to be less efficient whereby the Land and Survey Department had only successfully surveyed some 260,000 hectares between the 1960s and 2010.
On this concern, he said the government introduced the new initiative in October 2010 where the programme was implemented in two stages.
The first stage involves perimeter survey and gazette under Section 6 of the Sarawak Land Code as Agriculture Bumiputera Communal Reserve, followed by the next stage of individual lot survey and issuance of land titles under Section 18 of Sarawak Land Code, he said.
He added the new initiative is more efficient and has proven successful in bringing huge impact to all Bumiputeras in the state.
“Since 2010 until Oct 31 this year, about 913,656 hectares of NCR land have been perimeter-surveyed via the first stage and 753,456 hectares have been gazetted.
“Based on this achievement, we have successfully increased the output of NCR land survey nearly 20 times compared to the old approach.”
In view of that, Awang Tengah said he was upset that there were those who attacked and belittled the government’s effort “for their selfish political agenda”.
He stressed the new initiative was implemented to assist the people and speed up the application process, and not to seize the people’s land as alleged.
He admitted that there were some cases where the government was forced to acquire people’s land to implement development projects such as roads, hospitals, schools, bridges, drainage and irrigation, and others.
However, he said there were certain procedures on such land acquisition, whereby the identified land must be legally owned, with the owner then receiving reasonable compensation from the government.
Assistant Minister of Local Government and Housing Datu Dr Penguang Manggil, Assistant Minister of Women, Family and Childhood Development Rosey Yunus, Assistant Minister of Tourism, Arts and Culture Datuk Sebastian Ting, and Lambir assemblyman Ripin Lamat were among those present yesterday.