The situation has become so bad that in the last 30 years the numbers of Rakhain para in Lata Chapali (Kuakata) union of kalapara upazila in Patuakhali has reduced from 54 to 14.

"The number of families living in the paras that do remain has also decreased," said Emong Talukder, president of the Rakhain Cultural Academy, Kuakata.

The situation is said to have become particularly bad in the last three years.

Some of the Rakhain families have gone to Cox's Bazar and Bandarban and others have been forced to go back to Arakan state of Myanmar, from where their descendants first came.

Much of the agricultural land of the Rakhain community was forcibly grabbed in the years after the 1963 cyclone, which severely affected the community. The local land office claimed that all the land documents belonging to the Rakhain were damaged then, and it is alleged that this made it very easy for land to be stolen by people using faked documents.

However, now, the Rakhain community is loosing their para land.

"The Rakhain community has a practice that they don't sell para land which is considered common land - until the last family leaves the para," said Emong Talukder. 'But now, once a family is forced to leave the para due to harassment, people make fake documents and occupy even this land," he added.

The new land survey, currently taking place, backs up what Talukder and the local people are saying. This shows that the quantity of land possessed by the Rakhain community in Monjo para has reduced in a period of about 10 years from seven acres to one acre.

The survey also shows that the number of Rakhain families in this para has reduced from forty families to just five.

The Deputy Commissioner (DC) of Patuakhali district Prashanta Bhushan Barua acknowledged that land-grabbing does take place but told The Daily Star that it happened equally to the Bengali majority community and the Rakhains.

"We do get complaints from the Rakhain community about harassment. But we also get it from the Bengali community as well," he said. "If any person comes to us, whether he is Rakhain or Bengali, and raises questions about land-grabbing we address it very seriously."

Some Rakhains allege that the level of harassment greatly increased after the present government came into power. "Situation has never been quite so bad," one young man told The Daily Star.

The increased value of the land may be led to the recent land-grabbing spree. "In the last two or three years the price of land has increased many fold and this is what has lured some vested quarters to grab their land," one local Bengali hotelier said.

The Rakhain community first settled in the Kuakata coast in the 1780s when 50 families crossed the sea by boat from Arakan state now part of present Myanmar. The ancestors of present Rakhain community came from Then dou, Menang and Choufru area of Arakan.

In 1784 settlement, the British government gave each family 22 acres of land.

In mid 1960s, the number of Rakhains in Patuakhali and Barguna districts totalled nearly two lakhs and this has reduced to about 32,000 today.