Bhubaneswar, March 26: The state government seems to have slipped into coma over retrieving encroached land worth crores that rightfully belongs to the Jagannath temple trust of Puri.

While 56,853.623 acre of such land falls within the state, 395.25 acre lies outside Orissa. The temple administration has land records for only a small fraction of the property in the state. Sources said it had records for only 25.172 acre. The states in which there is such land include Bengal, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, besides Orissa.

But instead of making earnest efforts to recover this land, the state government has confined itself to writing letters. That too, once in a while. Law minister Bikram Keshari Arukh said letters have been written to chief secretaries of the states in which the land has been encroached upon. “Our objective is to get the land back and sell it to the encroachers who have been using the property for the past several years,” said Arukh.

Sources in the law department, however, said no serious attempts had been made in the last 30 years to retrieve the plots of land in other states. “The state government should constitute a special task force to retrieve the land lying outside the state,” said a senior officer in the law department.

The state government had first written a letter to the Bengal government on January 1, 1986, and another on May 15, 1986. Thereafter, no steps were taken for nearly 12 years. After that, a letter was dispatched to the Bengal government on May 17, 1997. After four years, another letter was written to the Bengal government on January 27, 2001.

Orissa’s first letter to Andhra Pradesh was issued on October 6, 1999, followed by another in 2003. They were followed up after two or three years. Since 2008, a letter was dispatched to the Andhra government every year.

The first letter to retrieve land was written to the Maharashtra government on January 1, 1986. The state government wrote five letters on the issue that year. It was more than 20 years before the government sent its next letter on May 11, 2007 to Maharashtra. The next letter to Maharashtra was sent on August 22, 2009. No one followed that up.

The case is similar with Madhya Pradesh and Bihar governments. The last letters to these states were written in 2009 and 2010, respectively. Communication with the Chhattisgarh government began only in 2005.

Law secretary Debabrata Das said: “The Puri temple administration is pursuing the matter. State government officials will soon write to the chief secretaries of the respective state governments to retrieve the encroached land.”