As the competition among various districts for housing the premier educational institutions continues, the Krishna district administration has informed the government that it is in possession of 8,000 acres of open land which could be utilised for the purpose.
A preliminary report outlining the availability of the open lands in possession of the administration has been sent to the government by district Collector M. Raghunandana Rao. The submission of the plan comes in the light of the Central Government assuring setting up of premier national educational and medical institutions in the successor State post bifurcation.
A major chunk of the land is identified at Kothur, Ibrahimpatnam, Gannavaram, Agiripalli and Musunuru areas, of which, a huge tract of 4,000 acres is located in the vicinity of Kothur alone. The rest of the land is scattered in bits of 35 to 40 acres extent in different areas. The land near Kothur is, however, demarcated as reserve forest area, but officials said rules provided for de-notifying the area if the work involved public interest, says Mr. Rao.
These locations apart, lands were also identified in many other sites and they are under the possession of the revenue, forest and other departments. Last week, the Collector had instructed authorities of different departments to identify lands and file a report. Based on the feedback, Mr. Rao submitted a preliminary report to the government a few days back.
With the budget session slated for July second week, the authorities wanted to utilise the opportunity and geared up with the requisite information as and when necessary. Though there was no dearth of land in the district, the authorities are taking care to see that only such pieces that fulfilled the conditions for location of institutions like IIT, IIIT and NIT were shortlisted.
Much depends on which institutes would be sanctioned to the district and where they would be established. Each Ministry like Human Resource Development, Petroleum, Tribal Welfare and others would depute their respective site selection committees to inspect lands and submit a report. Different parameters like geographical suitability, environmental ambience, service support system would be taken into consideration for identifying the lands.
