DEPUTY Chief Minister and Second Urban Development and Natural Resources Minister Datuk Amar Awang Tengah Ali Hasan (GPS-Bukit Sari) said allegations that the Sarawak government was confiscating NCR land through Section 6 are baseless.
He said that if land was acquired for the purpose of building infrastructure projects, the landowners would be compensated fairly.
“The allegations are baseless, if you want to accuse the state government of this, make sure you can back it up,” he told reporters during a press conference at the State Legislative Assembly (DUN) building here yesterday.
“We are not using Section 6 of the Sarawak Land Code to confiscate the land but we want to help the landowners,” he said.
Awang Tengah added that various methods of measuring land had been in place since the 1960s to 2010, with 260,000 acres of land measured over the last 50 years.
“But since then, we have introduced a new initiative through Section 6, which is perimeter survey. This is crucial as it marks the boundary of NCR lands.
“We are not forcing the landowners to use this method, if they want, we can hold a dialogue (to address the issue).
“We can even measure the land individually if they want us to upon request. But we cannot do it all at once,” he said.
He revealed that since 2010, through Section 6, a total of 910,000 hectares of land had been measured, which equated to 2.248 million acres.
“On average, we have managed to increase the output by 20 times and most of these have been gazetted and registered.
“If you are not confident of the gazette showing that it is indeed your land, they can always return it to us. But then again, there is no one returning it to us.
“There are a lot of requests for us to measure the lands by perimeter and after that, we will issue a gazette under the land code,” he said.
Awang Tengah maintained that perimeter survey was the first step to measuring lands and the second step was to measure it individually.
“We have been allocated a total of RM30 million for this purpose and increased our capacity in terms of the number of surveyors by adding 467 new officers.”
