BENGALURU: The Karnataka SC Development Corporation is all set to distribute 1,630 acres of land to 888 poor families belonging to scheduled castes.
According to sources in the corporation, the total cost of this is over Rs 80 crore. The sources told Express that the National Scheduled Castes Finance and Development Corporation has approved a proposal to procure farm land for the benefit of poor SC landless families for the year 2014-15.
The beneficiaries, a majority of them from North Karnataka, would each get a minimum of one acre of wet land or two acres of dry land. While 50 per cent of the cost of the land would be provided by the corporation as subsidy, the remaining would be borne by the beneficiary, which would be made available through loan from the SC Development Corporation.
The corporation has so far distributed 64,826 acres to 37,591 SC families across the state. This has cost the exchequer Rs 208 crore since the inception of the scheme in 1991.“The current cost of land already distributed to SC families is over Rs 65,000 crore,” an official said.
“The corporation, which had conducted a survey recently, found that the cost of a 10-acre farm land purchased for this scheme in Belagavi district 10 years back is now worth over Rs 150 crore,” he added.
Maintaining that procurement of land for the scheme has now become difficult due to skyrocketing prices, he said the cap for buying land for SC families has been put at Rs 10 lakh per acre. The land, which would be assigned in the name of the working women members of the SC families, cannot be alienated. The official said the scheme is in force only in Karnataka.