Tamil Nadu - Salem   

30 acres recovered from encroachers in Vazhapadi

Special Correspondent

Land was allotted to Lankan repatriates and mortgaged with Govt.

SALEM: Revenue officials retrieved 30 acres of prime land valued at Rs. 1 crore from encroachers near Vazhapadi.

The land, which had been mortgaged to the Government for constructing houses for Sri Lankan repatriates, was retrieved after a gap of two decades.

Rehabilitation programme

The Union Government, through the State, had advanced business and housing loans to Lankan repatriates who came to Tamil Nadu after the ethnic strife in the Island nation. Under its rehabilitation programme, the Government allotted housing loans after checking their passports and fair price cards during 1991.

No houses

Repatriates bought one-cent plots and after mortgaging land documents, acquired a loan of Rs. 10,000 each for constructing the house. But after receiving the money, many of these beneficiaries vanished without constructing houses. Those few who constructed houses also abandoned them and left.

This prompted the sellers of lands and a few encroachers nearby to occupy these lands despite knowing that it was mortgaged Government land. To retrieve these lands from the encroachers, on instructions from Salem Collector A. Sukumaran, a team of officials led by Vazhapadi Tahsildar D. Ananthakrishnan went to the spot and verified the land documents.

Documents' scrutiny

As per the Government records, the houses should have been constructed in the villages of Agraharam Vazhapadi, Pudupalayam, Mannaickenpatti, Thukkiampalayam, S. Vazhapadi, and Singapuram. But barring four tiled houses in Singapuram, there was none in other villages.

Mr. Ananthakrishnan told The Hindu that after scrutinising land and mortgage documents that ran to 1,000 pages, officials were able to identify the encroached lands. Many had been converted into rich fields of tapioca, sorghum and groundnut. The official team destroyed the crop and retrieved the land.

To prevent future encroachment, they also put up a banner warning people that the lands belonged to the Government.

The district administration directed revenue officials to trace and verify lands in other taluks that had been allotted to repatriates and undertake similar action.

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