Meanwhile, joint forces evicted dwellers of Chandmari slum in Narayanganj and recovered land belonging to the army.

Locals encroached the land of the park and built the market on it. They were also collecting rent from the shops.

DCC Deputy Estate Officer Shamsul Alam said, "We demolished the market, it had been on the land of the park for a long time." However, he did not mention the names of the land grabbers.

Joint forces knocked down shanties in the unauthorised Chandmari slum in Narayanganj and recovered around two and a half acres of land belonging to Bangladesh Army, our Narayanganj correspondent reports.

Nearly 20,000 people have now become homeless following the eviction of the dwellers. The land is allegedly worth Tk 6 crore.

The law enforcers had sent a notice to the slum dwellers on February 8 to move from the slum.

A number of them moved to other places but most of them stayed where they were.

Earlier, parliamentary standing committee on defence decided to demolish the slum but law enforcers failed to recover the land allegedly due to political intervention.

In the 1980s, the slum was allegedly built under the supervision of Nasim Osman, who was a Jatiya Party lawmaker then. Awami League lawmaker and Nasim Osman's brother Shamim Osman allegedly patronised the extension of the slum after the Ershad regime.

During the BNP-Jamaat alliance government, a number of BNP leaders allegedly took control of the slum and collected rent from the residents.

Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha (Rajuk) and Bangladesh Railway did not conduct any eviction drive in the Dhaka city yesterday. However, Bangladesh Railway recovered eight acres of land in Mymensingh and Netrakona, sources said.