Bhoomi Keralam project lands in trouble
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Differences of opinion are there between the employees' union and the Project Director.
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While the union complains of shortage of employees, the Project Director says the productivity of the personnel deployed is low.
The Bhoomi Keralam project, aimed at completing land resurvey in the State, appears to have plunged into trouble after nearly three years of its launch.
A trade union of government employees has called for the removal of Biju Prabhakar, Project Director for the Kerala Land Information Mission, alleging that he was no expert in survey and had failed to take the Survey Department into confidence. The mission was constituted to implement the project. Mr. Prabhakar told The Hindu on Thursday that he was ready to step down if that solved the problems.
Among the aims of the project are building up a real-time record of public land and preparation of survey records for 27,000 hectares of land to be distributed to the Adivasis in 1,000 locations.
Mr. Prabhakar said a combination of factors had delayed the project. The reasons were low skill levels of the employees deployed for the work, obstructions raised by their trade unions and apprehensions in the mind of people regarding resurvey.
The project deploys sophisticated instruments for speedy and accurate work. Use of these devices requires training and high levels of skill.
Mr. Prabhakar said training of the survey personnel, in collaboration with Keltron, had been mooted.
He said trade unions had interfered in the work, resulting in low productivity. Work yield per employee was low. He cited the example of forest land survey work now in progress in Idukki district, where a group of five persons covered less than two acres a day as against the target of 10 acres. Private agencies, he said, complete 30-40 acres a day.
Some people fear that public land in their hands would have to be surrendered after the resurvey. For example, at Melmuri village in Malappuram, the district where the project was launched first, field work has been completed, but out of the 6,300 people, only 4,200 had submitted data sheets regarding land possession.
Many ‘benami' land deals have come to light, said Mr. Prabhakar as he felt that the land mafia might be torpedoing the resurvey. In one case, he said, notice has been issued to a person in possession of 65 acres in violation of the land ceiling law.
A spokesman for the Joint Council of the State Service Organisations, however, said the union had suggested that resurvey of the remaining villages in the State could be completed within six months with the facilities available right now with the department, provided a fixed number of employees were set apart solely for the work.
A shortage of personnel is a key factor in the failure of the project, the spokesman said. The Survey Department employees are often deployed randomly and they have to take up works related to development projects at the cost of the resurvey.
He said the number of surveyors in the department had come down from 2,500 to 1,000 at the time of the launch of the project.
Successive governments had not filled the posts that fell vacant.
The spokesman said more than 453 people recently inducted into the project had not been provided adequate facilities to take up forest land survey in areas such as Attappady and Kuttampuzha. Even pregnant women had been posted for the forest land survey, he added.
Amid the differences of opinion on the implementation of the project, survey work had been completed for 15,000 acres of forest land in Wayanad, Kannur, Malappuram, Palakkad, Thrissur and Kollam, Mr. Prabhakar said.
K.A. MARTIN
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