THOOTHUKUDI: A day after petitioning District Collector K Elambahavath, demanding to protect her house from encroachers at Avudaiyarpuram, a 49-year-old widow was allegedly attacked by goons and her house was razed in the wee hours of Tuesday.
The woman has been admitted to the Thoothukudi Medical College Hospital and a case has been registered at the central police station against eight suspects.
The complainant, D Muthumari, told TNIE that nearly eight assailants reached her home around 3 am on Tuesday, and demolished her mud-roof house using an earth mover. They allegedly stamped on her stomach and chest as she resisted to leave the house, and dragged her out of the house, she said.
“How dare you file a petition against us with the collector and take the issue to the press,” she quoted the assailants saying. The house was razed a few minutes after I was pulled out and all my belongings were damaged,” she added.
Acting on the complaint, the Thoothukudi central police had registered an FIR against eight persons, including one Michael Arul Regan. However, the FIR has not been made public on the Tamil Nadu police website yet.
Sources said that it was not just Muthumari, but over 110 houses have been razed by encroachers backed by a businessman in the past few months. Despite complaints and protests, no action was taken and just six houses remain in the area, sources said.
The habitants of Avudaiyarpuram are daily wage labourers, and even as they filed multiple complaints against the culprits, no action was taken.
Muthumari’s son D Balasubramani, who works in Singapore, told TNIE that Avudaiyarpuram residents pay property tax (theervai), have water pipes, and power connections and use Avudaiyarpuram as the address on their ID cards.
Balasubramani had also lodged a complaint with the TN Police’s NRI Cell from Singapore and sent a video complaint to the Chief Minister, but to no avail. One Shanmugathai (85), whose house was demolished in July, died of mental distress on September 26, said sources.
Activist and Tamil Nadu Makkal Nala Iyakkam president SM Gandhi said, “There were over 120 small houses spread across 1.10 acres in Avudaiyarpuram.
Claiming that the land belonged to them, three siblings — Anthony, Michael and Chandrabose — had evicted the habitants and demolished the houses. However, the land documents they produced are bogus and not supported by any parent documents.”
Access to the land documents evoked suspicion as the land had remained as ‘government sarkar land’ till 2022, until the former collector changed the classification of the land to ‘Ryotwari land’ in an executive order on June 28, 2022.
“The trio then lodged a ‘document missing’ complaint at the central police station and using the receipts, they created a document citing a power of attorney registered at Madurai in 1941. Subsequently, the Thoothukudi tahsildar issued a patta for S Anthony, S Michael and Chandrabose on June 23, 2023,” said Gandhi.
The alleged encroachers had included the land housing the corporation’s public sanitary complex, even as the corporation authorities remained mute spectators, he said.
While Collector Elambahavath was not available for comment, Thoothukudi SP Albert John said criminal action against the culprits will follow as per the law. The petitions about the civil disputes have been forwarded to the revenue department to decide on the ownership of the disputed land, he added.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, activists questioned the silence of the district administration even as government land was looted using bogus documents.
At a time when corporation areas have no proper parking spaces in key commercial streets, allowing encroachments will set a bad precedent, they said.