CHENNAI: Hunt on for Revenue dept's missing land worth Rs 40 crore

By G Saravanan

Published in The New Indian Express, Chennai, on November 05, 2011:

Source:http://expressbuzz.com/cities/chennai/hunt-on-for-revenue-dept-land-worth-rs-40-crore/330079.html

CHENNAI:  The Revenue Department of the Chennai Collectorate is burning midnight oil for the past few decades to find its three grounds of prime property worth over Rs 40 crore on Chamiers Road in posh R A Puram locality (after the land mysteriously vanished from the permanent land register (PLR).

According to the documentary evidence, that was available with the Collector of Madras in 1923 and sourced by Express, the Revenue department’s revenue survey (RS) no-3920 off Chamiers Road had five grounds of land, which was allocated for Boyyamoli Varasiddhi Vinayagar Temple and its garden (nandavanam) in R A Puram.

Though the Vinayagar temple still exists in the same locality, the land size (that was allocated by the then Collector A H Cox to Guruswamy Mudaliar in 1923) has been mysteriously shrunk from five grounds to a meagre two grounds over the decades.

The Revenue Department was woken up from deep slumber after an activist R Natarajan moved RTI petition with the Tahsildar of Mylapore-Triplicane Taluk in 2005 to get more details about the RS no-3920 after locals grew suspicious.

“After the RTI petition, the department replied me that the RS no-3920 consists of only two grounds of land and the whole area was under illegal encroachment by eight persons,” Natarajan told Express.

After his persistent efforts, the Tahsildar of Mylapore-Triplicane Taluk in 2010 began cracking down on encroachers but hasn’t cleared the area off any encroachment. In the meantime, Natarajan was able to get a startling evidence from the Revenue Department that the particular survey number had marking of five grounds of land, but the PLR at Mylapore-Triplicane Taluk had shown it as just two grounds.

With the mystery still continuing about the systematic disappearance of the three grounds of land, which could have been encroached upon by anybody, Natarajan is pursuing the matter with the Chief Secretary to get it back for public purposes.