A district authority in Maharashtra state in western India has been ordered to take back land encroached upon by a state minister and designate it as a multi-faith burial ground as per a directive the authority made eight years ago. Last week, the Bombay High Court ordered the Thane Municipal Corporation “to secure the land from illegal encroachment.” The court also asked for a status report by Feb.12 on the land’s readiness to be used as a burial ground for faith groups, including Chri-stians. The Thane district administration, through a government notification in November 2016, allotted 37,000 square meters of government land as a burial ground, the court noted in its Jan. 8 order. The land “shall not be put to any use other than the use for which it has been reserv-ed,” the order said. The court took up the issue following a petition by Melwyn Fer-nandes, a Catholic activist, who complained that the Christian community in the area suffered from a lack of burial grounds as it could not use the land the government had allotted for burials. Fernandes, general secretary of the Association of Concerned Catholics, filed the public interest litigation in 2021 seeking the court’s intervention to ensure adequate burial land for Christians in Thane district. The petition alleged that the municipality, in 2019, engaged a private land-developing firm to prepare the land for use as a cemetery. But, the firm, alle-gedly owned by the state transport mini-ster, Pratap Sarnaik, did not develop the plot. However, Sarnik’s firm began constru-cting a commercial housing project adjacent to the designated burial ground and en-croached upon it. Fernandes told that the court order made the Christian community happy as the original burial ground plan designated an area for the community in the district. Christians in the state, who form barely 1 percent of its 132 million people, do not have enough burial grounds, Fernandes said, adding: “The case for Christians in Thane is worse.”