It’s back to square one, literally. Even as politicians and officials are busy preparing for the elections, the land outees of Gudatipally of Akkannapet mandal under Gouravelli reservoir have been holding dharna and vanta varpu at the project site for the past week demanding that they be paid compensation before continuing the works. About 150 agitators are participating in the agitation.
Many of them are small farmers who were allotted land long back and now the government wants to take back their land for the project. Many of them gave consent one-and-half years back after they were promised ₹ 6.95 lakh per acre. According to villagers, the government bought about 2,200 acres in the village after increasing the reservoir capacity from the proposed 1.4 tmcft to 8.4 tmcft. While compensation was paid to about 1,400 farmers, it was not released to others stating that the land was assigned land and government land and needs a re-survey. However, it was not completed so far and the farmers who sold their lands to the government could not buy lands elsewhere as they were not paid compensation so far.
“I am having about five acres land, of which about 30 kuntas are assigned land for which patta passbook was issued three decades ago. For the past one-and-half decade we are waiting for the compensation. Earlier too we held a vanta varpu programme in June and
“ The then Collector P. Venkataram Reddy and RDO K Shankar Kumar promised to address our problem within 10 days, but nothing happened. Now both the officials are transferred,” Nune Mallesham, one of the agitators, told The Hindu .
Mr. Mallesham also pointed out that there was variation in payment and they want the anomalies to be corrected.
. “While some of them were paid ₹ 7 lakh for a structure under one GO, similar structure under another GO was paid ₹ 21 lakh which is a huge variation. We want the anomalies to be corrected,” said Mr. Mallesham.
The agitators have rejected the appeal made by former MLA V. Satish Kumar, Collector D. Krishna Bhaskar and RDO Ananta Reddy to wait for three more months, saying the issue will be settled in the new government.
