An open letter to Zarif Khairo: Where did the 85 thousand acres of land of Sindh go?
Mr. Khero, 84,977.59 acres. This is the data that NAB Sukkur investigators say they have found tangled in records of irregularities in five districts of Sindh. The land, on paper, belongs to the Irrigation Department, which you head as secretary, but its ownership apparently requires “urgent instructions” before revenue officials can agree on who it really belongs to.
Read this number again. It is not a cleric’s slip a Patwari can fix in an afternoon. It is land spread over more than 500 villages: 38,854.72 acres in Dadu, 22,958.64 in Sajawal, 12,519.78 in Jamshoro, 6,620.63 in Shaheed Benazirabad, and 4,023.82 acres in Tando Muhammad Khan. About 85,000 acres of land, and NAB had to issue a formal order to correct the records and transfer the land in the name of your own department. If the department cannot account for this scale of land in its charge, what is it actually accounting for?
This is not the first time your name has appeared in the NAB file this year. Investigators had already sought your service record dating back to your years as an executive engineer, along with documents related to the installation and financing of gates 44 to 59 at the Sukkur barrage, and your dealings with at least one contractor. That inquiry came and went with little public explanation. NAB Sukkur has now launched two separate, wide-ranging probes into corruption, misappropriation of public funds, abuse of power and disproportionate assets, which have named you and “other senior officials and influential persons”. That last sentence deserves its own question: Who are these influential people, and why does a land-records scandal of this size require euphemisms rather than a list of names?
Such complaints are considered a process to be filtered before a full investigation. The Sindh government itself notified a committee headed by the chairman of the Anti-Corruption Establishment in December 2024, whose aim was to investigate NAB complaints against government employees earlier. Did that screening happen here, or did the two investigations just proceed around it? The public deserves to know what protection, if any, was placed in your name earlier and the lands of your department became the subject of the NAB file.
I want to be fair about what is proven and what is alleged. NAB started investigation, did not give punishments. You have not been found guilty of anything in a court of law, and due process should run its course without the mob ruling in favor of the judge. But due process is not the same as silence, and silence is what the public has received. There has been no statement from your office explaining how the 85,000 acres ended up in the disputed records. There is no accounting for how long the department knew, if it knew at all. No word on who your designated “influencers” actually are.
Sindh’s irrigation system delivers water to farmers who have no NAB office to write to and no lawyer to hire. When land for canals, drains, and public infrastructure disappears into unclear ownership for years, their water, their crops, and their province bear the cost, whether or not anyone is convicted of anything. This is true regardless of how the investigation ends.
So the question is simple Mr. Khairo. How did the land records of five districts become so irregular that it required the intervention of NAB instead of a routine departmental audit? Who is using or occupying the land while its ownership is unsettled? And why should the people of Sindh wait for a court decision before getting an honest answer to the bureaucracy’s question: Whose name was that land actually in, and how long did your department know?
Until there is a public accounting—not the NAB notice, not the leaked document, but your statement—it will read like every missing file in Sukkur’s investigation queue. Prove it’s a different one.
The post An open letter to Zarif Khairo: Where did Sindh’s 85 thousand acres of land go? appeared first on Daily Pakistan English News.
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