The government has implemented Land Use Policy 2012 in Chitwan, Nawalparasi and Bara districts by zoning land for specified purposes
and prohibiting its use in other ways.

The policy has classified land into seven categories — agricultural, residential, commercial, industrial, forest, public and others. The government enforced the land use policy following continued development of farmland for housing purposes in a bid to save it for growing food.

Meanwhile, the National Land Use Project, the implementing agency, has also started zoning land in Kathmandu, Lalitpur, Jhapa, Banke and Kailali districts. The government has decided to implement the policy in 500 VDCs along the East-West Highway during this fiscal year.
“Both segregation and mapping work has been completed in these three Tarai districts,” said Narayan Chaudhary, project director at the National Land Use Project. He added that work was being speeded up in the five districts where the project would be implemented next.
According to Chaudhary, the implementation of the policy had been hindered due to the lack of a Land Use Act. “The constitution has guaranteed the right to property. So a new act is necessary to implement the policy so that the constitutional right will not be violated while classifying land into different purposes,” he said. According to him, the project has been writing a draft act and will come up with an integrated draft by mid-July 2014. Presently, the project is conducting meetings to gather inputs before producing a final draft of the proposed Land Use Act. The draft will also include inputs from UN Habitat.
“We will incorporate the inputs of UN Habitat before writing the final draft,” said Chaudhary. “This will add more perspectives to the upcoming act.”

As per the government, 27 percent of the country’s land area is good for agriculture,  39.6 percent is covered by forests, 12 percent is pastureland, 17.2 percent consists of snow and rocks and 2.6 percent is covered by water.

The policy is also expected to act as a guideline for planners and policy makers to formulate immediate measures to address the growing risk of a food crisis due to increased fragmentation of fertile land and haphazard urbanization.

Population pressure has prompted more people to migrate to urban areas leading to agricultural and forest land being built up. According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives, the country has lost 59,464 hectares of paddy fields to urbanization since 2008-09.

source: the kathmandu post,24 Dec 2013