The Hindu : Kerala / Thiruvananthapuram News : Adalats to redress farmers' grievances

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Thursday, Jan 11, 2007
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Kerala

Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram

Adalats to redress farmers' grievances

Special Correspondent

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Agriculture Department will organise about 1,000 adalats to redress complaints of farmers, Minister for Agriculture Mullakkara Ratnakaran has said.

The District Agriculture Officer, a representative of the Director of Agriculture, and local panchayat president would hear the complaints at Krishi Bhavans, the Minister said here on Wednesday.

Mr. Ratnakaran said this would be the first time that such adalats were being organised in the country. Besides, toll-free phones would be set up so that farmers could contact the Minister. Officials would be designated at his office and the Directorate of Agriculture to attend to the calls from the farmers.

He also proposed to discuss projects with farmers with a view to ensuring their participation in projects being drawn up for the sector. For this, meetings would be convened in all the districts. He would also meet the organisations of employees of his department. General transfers of employees would be effected only once in a year according to norms. They should be meeting the Minister's for transfers only if there were complaints that they did not receive justice.

Mr. Divakaran denied that the selection process for appointment of Vice-Chancellor to the Kerala Agricultural University (KAU) had hit a bottleneck. The Chancellor had only sought a clarification on the recommendation of the name of IAS Officer K.R. Muraleedharan for the post and this had been given. The university offered courses of diverse nature unlike other agriculture universities and hence its Vice-Chancellor need not necessarily be an agriculture scientist.

He said that serious issues affecting the functioning of the university would be probed once the Vice-Chancellor and Registrar were appointed. He was non-committal on action on the inquiry reports obtained by the Government during the UDF rule.

The Minister announced that the proposed Farmers' Commission would be formed this month itself. The commission would be able to intervene to prevent exploitation of farmers by market forces. Pepper would be procured if the prices fell below a fixed rate. The State Government urged the Centre to increase the import duty of coconut oil and oil cake to 300 per cent and 100 per cent respectively.

He said his Private Secretary was replaced on the basis of a request from the Secretary on health grounds. Reports that he was removed because of corruption were baseless.

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