Farmers to protest official lethargy to reclassify land for NABARD godown

RANIPET: The Revenue Department has been delaying reclassification of wrongly labelled land belonging to the primary agricultural cooperative credit society at Siruvalayam village in Nemili taluk for nearly six months, which is coming in the way of handing over the land for building a godown funded by NABARD. Irked by this, farmers threatened a protest on Friday.

However, officials called farmers for a meeting on Thursday in a bid to prevent the agitation. But, Tahsildar Sumathi failed to turn up at the meeting she had called for with the Tamilaga Vivasayigal Sangam members to prevent the Friday’s agitation. Disappointed farmers, who came to the Nemili taluk office for the meeting, staged a sit-in protest and declared to go ahead with their agitation on Friday.

“Trouble started after a total of 8,640 sqft in Ulianallur village belonging to the above credit society was wrongly classified as “natham poromboke” in revenue records resulting in the society being unable to hand over the land to National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) to construct a 500-tonne capacity godown. NABARD has already sanctioned Rs 73.25 lakh for the facility,” society president V Ravichandran told DT Next.

Farmers’ initial happiness at NABARD volunteering to build the godown turned sour when despite “all necessary documents being submitted by the Siruvalayam society to the RDO, Tahsildar and Panapakkam RI, things failed to move,” sources alleged. When a new RI took over, the former official, who had not moved the files, told Ravichandran to approach the new official to get the work done. This resulted in Ravichandran along with credit society officials meeting Ranipet Collector S Valarmathi on Monday and submitting a petition in this regard.

When this reporter contacted, Collector Valarmathi said, “I received the information only on Monday. Action will be taken to reclassify the land immediately so that there is no delay in the site being allotted to NABARD.”