KOCHI: After spending a considerable amount of time and money for several years, the government has put on the back-burner the Kerala State Land Bank (KSLB) project, an ambitious attempt to take the inventory of all public land across the state for use for development purposes through selling them or leasing them out.
Though officials cited no particular reasons for sitting on the project, TNIE has learnt that KSLB required a huge number of staff and teams including surveyors, draftsmen, etc, to ensure that the work continues. This may have led the government to go slow on the project, said sources. “The aim was to make a total database of ‘poramboke lands’ or the public land which are not assessed to revenue records. We don’t know what will happen to the databank that we have already prepared,” said an officer.
When contacted, Revenue Minister K Rajan, however, denied that the KSLB project is scrapped. “We are commencing the digital survey of land across the state from November 1 under which a total of 400 villages will be covered in 12 months. The purpose of KSLB will be served under the digital survey,” he explained.
However, officials in the department said for the last couple of years, there has not been any movement on the project. “Till 2018, there were officers assigned under KSLB. However, after the officers got posted to other sections, this project has been more or less dead,” another officer who was deputed at KSLB said on condition of anonymity.
It is estimated that the government has spent at least Rs 10-15 crore on the project so far.
Though there are several legal instruments such as the Kerala Land Conservancy Act, 1957 and The Kerala Revenue Recovery Act, 1968, that empowered the government to conserve, improve and manage the lands vested with it, encroachments in government lands have been rampant, especially after the 1990s. The KSLB project’s purpose was to take inventory of government land and curtail encroachments on such lands for its scientific inventorisation and professional management.
This would have assisted the government in the rational use of the government-owned lands with a perspective on the future developments of the state. “Through this, the government was aiming to implement measures for the overall control of encroachments and rational use of government lands for meeting the developmental as well as social obligations of the state in the future,” said an official.
Why the survey?