KOCHI: Finally, the Kerala State Electricity Board seems to have woken up. Based on an Express report on the intrusion into its land in Idukki, the KSEB has called a meeting of the Land Management Unit and other senior officers on Thursday.
The KSEB has also decided to appoint two retired IAS officers in the Land Management Unit, functioning under staffed for a while. A senior KSEB officer said steps to retrieve land in Idukki and other districts might be pondered over in the meeting. An executive engineer in charge of the Chithirapuram division in Idukki said he was instructed to reach Thiruvananthapuram on Thursday to discuss the issue.
“The meeting will assess the ground situation before exploring ways to retrieve the land,” said the officer. The KSEB has already collected detailed reports of the encroached land from various divisional offices in Idukki. Though the Board claims it has around 50,000 acres of own land and around 24,000 acres of leased land, the department has no specific data related to the encroached land.
Out of the 1,200 encroachments in Idukki, the KSEB could confirm only the invasion of 6 acres of land under the survey number 843 A&B 212 at Munnar Kanan Devan Hill Village in Idukki, which was usurped by 56 people. Interestingly, KSEB till date has not retrieved a single piece of land in Munnar despite receiving a favourable court order against Devikulam MLA S Rajendran in an encroachment case in the 90s.