The Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HR&CE) Department has deployed GPS-powered rovers to survey temple lands in both Coimbatore and Tiruppur districts in an accurate manner and to ascertain the extent of encroachments.
Officials said that two GPS rovers were allocated for Coimbatore district. The two devices will be prioritised for those temples with large amounts of lands in the district in the initial phase and will later be expanded to all temples under the control of the HR&CE Joint Commissioner (Coimbatore Zone), the officials said.
There will be five licensed surveyors who would be handling the two rovers. The HR&CE Department has hired them based on a one-year contract as it was estimated that the survey process would be completed by 2022. These devices will yield authentic data of the boundaries of the lands belonging to each temple, which would aid in determining the encroachments that have not been identified so far, according to the officials.
As part of the first phase, the two GPS rovers were deployed for surveying the temple lands belonging to Patteeswarar Temple in Perur. The temple is estimated to have 367 acres of land, of which around 100 acres have been surveyed in the past one week using the rovers, officials said. After this, the rovers will be used to survey lands in Sulur such as that of Vaidyanatha Swamy Temple that is estimated to have nearly 400 acres of temple lands, the HR&CE Department officials added.
In Tiruppur district, officials said that three GPS rovers and eight licensed surveyors were involved in the surveying of temple lands for the past one week. The rovers were used in locations such as Nallur and Udumalpet and were also used to survey the lands that were recently retrieved from encroachers, according to officials.
