The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : `Need for district-level committees to monitor rehabilitation'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Feb 04, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

`Need for district-level committees to monitor rehabilitation'

By Our Staff Reporter

TIRUNELVELI, FEB. 3. The State secretary of the Communist Party of India, R. Nallakannu, today urged the Government to form district-level committees to monitor the rehabilitation exercises being carried with the assistance of the Union and State Governments in the tsunami-hit coastal hamlets of Tamil Nadu.

"When the Maharashtra Government formed village-level committees to monitor the rehabilitation operations after the killer earthquake almost destroyed Lattur and Osmanabad districts, they functioned so effectively to yield desirable results. Hence, we demand the formation of such committees here also as the fisherfolk have been pushed 30 years back due to this natural calamity," Mr. Nallakannu told reporters here this evening.

Need for strategy

He suggested that effective strategies be evolved at the earliest to chemically treat the lands close to the sea as the salty water that invaded into the land had totally changed the chemical nature of the soil to leave it unsuitable for cultivation.

He appealed to the State Government to totally waive the sales tax imposed on imported outboard engines of the boats since most of the fishermen had to go for new engines to replace the damaged ones.

On the Chief Minister, Jayalalithaa's announcement in the Assembly that she would move the Supreme Court to cancel the results of the 2004 Lok Sabha elections in Tamil Nadu and for a re-poll in all the 39 constituencies, he said the Chief Minister's charges on mass deletion of voters from the electoral rolls after nine months only showed that she had lost her faith in the democratic electoral process.

On the Government's decision to extend the controversial TESMA for another six months, Mr. Nallakannu said the present Government had not learnt any lesson even after its worst debacle in the last parliamentary elections. He also criticised the Government's decision to merge the sub-registrar offices in the rural areas with the registrar offices in the taluks.

He rejected reports that consistent efforts were being made to engineer a split in the Democratic Progressive Alliance in the State, saying it was mere "speculation."

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