Monday, Jun 23, 2003
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Karnataka
By T.V.Sivanandan
Official sources told The Hindu here today that the Ordinance had not taken away the right of the people to sell their property, but had only placed restrictions on the sale or lease of lands indiscriminately. Unlike in other non-command areas, the farmers would not have the unfettered right to sell or lease their lands to farmers from outside the State, and a high-level committee of the Irrigation Department would scrutinise the proposals before allowing the sale or lease of lands in the command areas. The Water Resources Minister, H.K.Patil, said the work of scrutinising applications had been entrusted to a senior official of the Irrigation Department, and soon a committee would be formed in all command areas to examine applications for sale of land. The clause on allowing the sale of land after scrutiny by the committee has been included to prevent the Ordinance from being challenged in court on the plea that the State could not interfere with the right of farmers to sell their land to any Indian citizen. The scrutiny by the official committee would act as a deterrent on the indiscriminate sale of lands in the command area, sources said. They pointed out that the sale and lease of land in the command areas, particularly in the Upper Krishna Project (UKP), had increased in the recent past. According to official records, more than 50,000 acres of land in the command area has been sold to Andhra Pradesh farmers in the past one year in Surpur taluk of Gulbarga District alone. This was apart from the large-scale transfer of land in the command areas of UKP on lease, which goes unrecorded. Sources said that from the date the Government made known its intention to issue an Ordinance to ban sale or lease lands in the UKP command area and till now, more than 500 transactions of sale had been reported in Surpur taluk alone. Apart from regulating the sale of land, the Government was also taking steps to prevent the lease of lands to Andhra Pradesh farmers by monitoring the agricultural activities in the command areas and verifying the ownership details of the farmer taking up agricultural operations. In an attempt to stop Andhra Pradesh farmers from purchasing land in the command areas, the Government proposes to strictly implement the cropping pattern suggested for the command area concerned and take steps to prevent its violation. Although the cultivation of crops such as paddy, sugarcane, banana that need more water are banned in the UKP command area, there has been large scale violation of the cropping pattern, and the area under paddy is estimated to be more than 50,000 hectares. Incidentally, a large part of the paddy area is on land that was either purchased or taken on lease by Andhra Pradesh farmers. The Government has decided to adopt a multi-pronged approach to prevent farmers from taking up paddy by launching a publicity campaign. It has decided to make the farmers avoid paddy cultivation this year also and plans to regulate water supply into the canals. Paddy needs a lot of water and if its supply is regulated, the paddy fields will not get the required quantity of water causing heavy losses to farmers. This, the Government hopes, will deter farmers from going in for paddy in the long run.
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