Never ending NH woes

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Thiruvananthapuram: With the National Highw-ay Authority of India suspending the survey to widen NH 47 in Karunag-apally in the last week of December 2012, because of public opposition, land acquisition has come to a standstill. Those who were to be evicted claimed that the rehabilitation and resettlement package announced by the UDF government in May 2012, was not adequate.
Kozhikode district collector, K. V. Mo-han Kumar, has since come up with a more liberal package, which has been agreed to in principle by chief minister Oommen Chandy and the PWD and Revenue ministries.
Kumar had prepared the package for Kozhiko-de district alone, but it will now be implemented on a state wide basis. According to Kumar, those who have less than five cents of land after land acquisition will henceforth get land to build a house.
“We have nine categories of people classified according to how much property they own and lose by land acquisition, and whether they pay income tax or not. They will be compensated according to each category,” Kumar told DC.
The cabinet was supposed to take up the proposal today, but postponed it to next week. PWD Minister V.K. Ebrahim Kunju told Deccan Chronicle that the suspended works at the NH 47 would be resumed by February 15, so that the notification would not lapse by March 30. He said that though work on the NH17 at Kozhikode was suspended for a few days, it has resumed. “There is no alternative apart from resuming the survey work as soon as possible on NH 47. We will take the public woes in right earnest and settle the issue amicably,” Kunju said.
But Hiway Action Forum state president, S. Prakash Menon, does not trust the politicians any more. “According to the project report of the NHAI, they require only 27.5 metres from both sides of the highway. But here, they have already acquired 30.5 metres almost 40 years back and at several stre-tches, the land has been encroached by pavement dwellers,” Menon said.
Jacob Mario, a gazetted officer settled in Kollam district, lamented that it is already three years since the boundary stone was laid in his seven cents of land at his ancestral property which too was acquired 40 years ago.
“Since the four cents of land in the front of my property has been notified, I am not in a position to move back and build a new house though it is urgent as the ancestral house is in a dilapidated state. When housing is a basic need, I wonder why the government can’t answer my genuine woes?” queries Mario.Like Mario, there are thousands of people who have been affected by the land acquisition.
The UDF government has a tough task ahead to mend the broken promises the Chandy government made to thousands of evictees in the state. A senior NHAI official told this newspaper that he is helpless as long as the state government gives him the go ahead to resume the pending works.