Govt sets the ball rolling to resolve podu land issue

Khammam: Transport Minister Puvvada Ajay Kumar assured that the government was ready for resolution of long-pending podu land issues in the State.

The Minister speaking while chairing a district-level coordination meeting here on Friday.

The district coordination committee appointed district Collector as the convenor, Commissioner of Police, ITDA PO, Additional Collectors, district forest officer, DRDO, DTWO were appointed members, and MPs MLAs, MLCs, ZP Chairman were appointed special invitees for the programme.

During in the meeting, Minister informed district has 1,57,531 acres (14.61 %) forest land. He asked the officials of the departments of ITDA, Forrest and Revenue to conduct jointly survey on forest lands to solve the issues.

He said that around 94 Gram Panchyats in 134 villages under 10 mandals have the podu land issue in Khammam district. He said that the officials received 18,295 applications against 42,409 acres of lands.

He asked the officials to conduct survey in the villages who were doing farming before 2005 on podu lands. Use technical methods of satellite and digital surveys for putting reports online, he said.

He told officials to identify farmers who depended on the lands and issued pattas, they will eligible for Rythu Bandhu scheme.

He said the ROFR pattas would be given to the original podu farmers.

Ajay said every official should create awareness among the people on forest development.

MPs Nama Nageswara Rao, Vaddiraju Ravichandra, MLC Tata Madhusudhan, MLAs Bhatti Vikramarkha, Sandra Venkata Veeraiah, Ramulu Naik, ZP Chairman L Kamal Raju, Distirct Collector VP Gautham, Commissioner of Police Vishnu S Warrier, ITDA PO P Gautham and other officers were participated in the meeting.