India and Nepal have agreed to complete the mapping of land occupied across their shared border within three years, giving fresh push to a long-running technical issue that has affected communities on both sides.
According to The Kathmandu Post, the decision was taken at the 13th meeting of the Survey Officials’ Committee (SOC), which concluded in Lucknow on Friday. The SOC works under the Boundary Working Group, headed by the survey chiefs of Nepal and India, with Joint Field Survey Teams carrying out technical work on the ground, including documenting changes and examining boundary pillars.
The exercise will use unmanned aerial vehicles to identify and document areas where people from one country are cultivating or living on land that falls within the territory of the other. The joint survey is expected to begin after the monsoon, around September or October.
The 182 sets of strip maps signed by the two countries in 2007 had already identified hundreds of hectares where citizens of one country were cultivating or residing on land belonging to the other. The latest exercise is aimed at creating a common technical assessment of the disputed and occupied areas, rather than immediately deciding ownership.
The problem is linked partly to changes in the courses of rivers along the Nepal-India border. When the boundary was originally demarcated, the Fixed Boundary Principle was used in several riverine areas, but over the years, shifting river channels have moved land from one side of the boundary to the other, leaving residents of both countries cultivating or living on land that technically falls across the border.
The issue gained wider attention after Nepal Prime Minister Balendra Shah told Parliament in May that he had learned of land occupation affecting both Nepal and India, prompting renewed diplomatic attention to the long-pending survey work.
— Daily Archives, World Desk