‘Officials misled CM on Thirumazhisai satellite township’

By G Saravanan

Published in The New Indian Express, Chennai on November 12, 2011:

Source:http://expressbuzz.com/states/tamilnadu/%E2%80%98officials-misled-cm-on-satellite-township%E2%80%99/332421.html

CHENNAI: Hundreds of farmers from five villages surrounding Kuthambakkam near Thirumazhisai on Friday made a fervent appeal to the Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa to reconsider her government’s proposal to set up a Satellite Township amidst fertile lands.

Whle making the appeal, they alleged that the Tamil Nadu Housing Board (TNHB) officials have “deliberately misled” the Chief Minister by hiding the status of the vast tract of fertile wet lands. The Chief Minister in September had announced that the township would come up in 311 acres of land near Thirumazhisai on the Chennai-Bangalore Highway by bringing together Chembarambakkam, Kuthambakkam, Parvatharajapuram, Narasingapuram and Vellavedu villages.

Due to the local farmers’ agitations in the past, the proposal for such a township amid fertile arable land had been shelved three times in 1996, 2001 and 2006.

While the TNHB officials aimed at acquiring about 2,000 acres of arable land in 1996 for the first time from nine villages in the locality for the project, they failed in the face of protests by thousands of farmers.

In another attempt in 2001, TNHB officials modified the proposal to 1,700 acres. But this time too, they couldn’t succeed and in their third attempt in 2006, they once again modified their proposal and tried to acquire 460 acres of fertile land for the project.

Once again, the farmers stood unitedly and forced out the authorities from taking any land from these villages, which were known as the second ‘rice bowl’ in the state after Thanjavur.

Speaking to Express, R Elango, former president of Kuthambakkam Village Panchayat, who has been involved in the movement against the township since the beginning, said, “Despite the Agriculture department’s statistics, which clearly shows that over 2,500 acres of land in these villages are falling under wetland category and farmers here cultivate paddy in a three-crop cycle every year, we unable to understand how the TNHB has proposed such a project.”

In a reply obtained under RTI in May 2007 by a local farmer, Housing Secretary of TNHB had replied that the proposal for Satellite Township had been finalised based on the Revenue Department records claiming that around 745 acres of lands in these villages were falling under dry lands.

“Villagers (farmers) know that the record was artificially created only to bring in such satellite township project here,” Elango said.

Villagers meet Collector

Villagers on Friday met the Tiruvallur Collector Ashish Chatterjee and handed over a memorandum addressing the Chief Minister to look into their problem with a kind heart.