Malda, March 31: The West Bengal State Legal Services Authority wants the Malda district administration to try and resettle the thousands of people who have lost their home to erosion by the Ganga on the sandbanks that have come up on the river in the past two decades.

The suggestion came from erosion victims and was voiced by Justice Kalyanjyoti Sengupta after yesterday’s Lok Adalat, which was held to hear 1,550 appeals made by people displaced by the Ganga in Malda’s Manikchak.

Justice Sengupta is a member-secretary of the state legal services authority and a judge in Calcutta High Court.

“If we get all the relevant information on the chars (sandbanks) from the irrigation and land and land reforms department, we will look into the prospect of rehabilitating the displaced families there,” Justice Sengupta had said yesterday.

District magistrate Chittaranjan Das said there was a dispute with the Shahibganj district in neighbouring Jharkhand over the chars. “This is a complex matter that has to be first settled at the state level,” Das said.

In December, the deputy commissioner of Shahibganj, S.S. Prasad, had written to Das, demanding possession of the sandbanks that lie across the median line of the Ganga towards Jharkhand.

The matter was referred to the Writers’ Buildings in Calcutta, but no instructions have come from there.

Yesterday, a division bench of the high court, comprising Justices Indira Banerjee, Prasenjit Mondal, Parthasakha Dutta and Sengupta, heard the appeals at Malda College.

District administration sources confirmed that the judges heard 1,475 cases. Seventy-five appeals could not be heard as some of the people who had made them were either dead or failed to turn up, the sources said.