Haryana approves amendment to village common lands rules

Chandigarh: The Nayab Singh Saini-led state cabinet has approved an amendment to the Haryana Village Common Lands (Regulation) Rules, 1964, and the policy for providing passage/rasta through shamlat deh lands for private projects.

These rules may be called the Haryana Village Common Lands (Regulation) Amendment Rules, 2026.

The cabinet approved adding Rule 5A in the Haryana Village Common Lands (Regulation) Rules, 1964, providing therein that on the request of a person intending to establish a project that requires the CLU (change of land use) or license from an authority concerned and whose project land has either no passage or an insufficient passage to fulfill the condition of such CLU or license, and on the resolution of the gram panchayat concerned with a 3/4 majority and of gram sabha with a 2/3 majority, the state govt. may earmark a new passage in the shamlat land of that panchayat to give access to such project land.

The new passage remains the property of the panchayat and is available for common use. Such earmarking shall be subject to the transfer of ownership rights of 5% of such project/licensed area or four times the size of land earmarked by the gram panchayat for passage, whichever is more. Such transferred land shall become part of the area approved for the project and will be provided in a fully developed form, along with access to the utility services being used in the remaining project area.

Other terms and conditions shall be such as may be specified by the state govt from time to time and shall be complied with by the person concerned. A policy framed under this rule was also approved, wherein the details of other conditions and standard operating procedures have been given.

Notably, infrastructural projects, housing projects, industrial projects, commercial projects, etc., require various permissions like the CLU and licence from different departments of the govt. These projects also require passage of the requisite width as mandated by the policies of the respective departments. In such cases, difficulties emerged in the past in providing the path through lands in the shamlat deh, as the sale/long-period lease of such land coming under passage was not permissible. To ease this difficulty, the said amendments were approved.