The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh / Guntur News : Palle Bata petitions gather cyber dust

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Friday, Sep 17, 2004

Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh - Guntur

Palle Bata petitions gather cyber dust

By Ramesh Susarla

GUNTUR, SEPT. 16 . The Rajiv Palle Bata launched by the Congress soon after coming to power seems to have slipped down in the order of priorities of the State Government.

The Chief Minister, Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, visited Guntur on August 8 to participate in the day-long programme. He travelled 40 km in Amaravathi and Tadikonda mandals and received 3,122 petitions. An enquiry in the district administration revealed that no action was taken even on a single petition till Thursday though norms are strict regarding `redressing' or `addressing' the grievance.

Special software `petitions monitoring system' was developed to enable to the Chief Minister's Office to monitor the number of grievances. The District Revenue Officer, B. Rama Rao, sent all the petitions to the departments concerned within a couple of days.

It was the responsibility of the district-level officers and the departmental heads at the State level to monitor the action on the petition and post the development to the district Collector, the planning wing and the CMO, but not a single Action Taken Report was available till Thursday.

Plea for pattas

Out of the 3,122 petitions, majority were from the urban areas and about 2,500 of them pertained to requests for patta for land.

The remaining does not attract any major financial commitment from the Government, but were unattended to. The availability of Government land was still being ascertained by the Revenue Department and it was not available near urban pockets making the job difficult for them.

The Palle Bata programme was being taken up once in a month in two or three mandals only unlike the Janmabhoomi programme of the previous TDP Government, which was held throughout the State for a week.

The Congress believed that their method would be more effective.

During the last round of Janmabhoomi - 18th - before elections a record 7.44 lakh petitions were received and all of them are stored in the computers of the district administration with no action being initiated on them.

The former Chief Minister, N. Chandrababu Naidu, had stopped reviewing them to conform to the code of conduct prior to the elections, officials said. Whether these 3,122 petitions will also meet the same fate remains to be seen.

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