MARINE DEPARTMENT LIBRARY
alleviated. By the second week registration is usually complete and all 'white cards', birth certificates, identity cards and other documents checked to ensure that no additions or substitutions have been made since screening took place. Each household is then required to produce a group photograph of all members of the family, which will eventually be affixed to the tenancy card at the reception estate, and the head of the household then receives his letter of authority to become a tenant in a particular resettlement estate. During the third week, the Clearance Unit prepares a nominal roll showing the composition of each household and forwards this, together with all the group photographs, to the estate staff one or two weeks before the move, so that rooms of the right size can be allocated in advance.
53. The move takes place from the fourth week onwards. If the clearance is a large one as many as 1,000 persons may move in one day but movements generally tend to be piecemeal, depending on the date by which the squatter has finished decorating his new estate room. If required the department provides transport for the squatters and their personal belongings. By this time they will have sold their structures to contractors for the salvage value of the materials and within a few days of the move the clearance area will be free for permanent develop-
ment.
54. Meanwhile, if cultivation is involved, the Cultivation Unit will have completed its survey and prepared schedules of crop values and the area of the cultivation plots. Farmers on what was formerly leased agricultural land are eligible for crop compensation and disturbance allowance. Ex-gratia compensation is also paid to squatter cultivators who can prove that they have continuously farmed the land for some years. Crop compensation is paid at the rate of the market value of the crops on the day of identification. Ex-gratia compensation in the urban area is 60 cents a square foot if the land has been cultivated continuously since 1941, and 10 cents a square foot for land that has been opened up between 1942 and October 1954. No compensation is payable for land opened up after this date. In the New Territories, different rates apply. Owner-cultivators receive 10 cents a square foot however long they have been cultivating the land, while other cultivators, if they are in the Tsuen Wan/Kwai Chung layout area, are paid 60 cents a square foot for land opened up before 1941, 10 cents if it has been under cultivation for six years before clearance, and 5 cents if between two and six years. For the rest of the New Territories, the rates are respectively 10 cents,
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