The Mananchira–Vellimadukunnu Road Action Committee will submit a mass petition to Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, who will be in the city on Saturday.
The petition will be to seek allocation of funds for acquiring land to convert the Mananchira-Vellimadukunnu road into a four-way highway.
Road committee general secretary M.P. Vasudevan said that the State government should release the funds before the expiry of the draft notification for acquiring land for the project in April 2015.
A sum of Rs.100 crore should be released in the supplementary budget in February and the remaining amount in the fresh budget of March.
An estimate of Rs.450 crore has been prepared for acquiring land for the project. The Revenue Department has already submitted its recommendations of the six District Level Purchase Committee (DLPC) meetings held in the last couple of months.
Final callNow a five-member State-level Empowered Committee chaired by the Chief Secretary will take a final call on the value of land fixed for six stretches of the 8.4 km Mananchira-Vellimadukunnu road on the NH 212.
Mr. Vasudevan said that the petition had been signed by 2,222 persons including prominent personalities, M.G.S. Narayanan. M.T. Vasudevan, P. Valsala, U.K. Kumaran, V.M. Vinu, P.K. Gopi, Bishop Varghese Chakkalakal, Swami Nityananda, and Imam V. Abdul Ghani Faisi, for speeding up the acquisition process.
He also warned that the committee would have no option but to take out a march to the Secretariat on December 18 if nothing materialised after meeting the Chief Minister. Hundreds of people from different walks of life had taken part in a hunger-strike led by historian M.G.S. Narayanan from the District Collectorate here on June 5. It was then a meeting chaired by Chief Minister and participated by Ministers M.K. Muneer and V.K. Ibrahim Kunju had decided to implement the project in a time-bound manner.
But even after four months, the Revenue Department had failed to complete the acquisition process. It should have been completed by August 31. The department also delayed the process of fixing the value of land owned by private individuals. The whole process should have been over by August 20, Mr. Vasudevan said.
