The Times of India            28.12.2013   

Corporation to prepare land bank

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Seven decades since its formation, the city corporation has constituted a special committee to undertake a massive project to prepare a land bank. The civic body will officially launch the scheme in the first week of 2014.

The project, which covers all the 100 wards spread over an area of 214.86 sq km, will be implemented in three phases. Under the first step, all those unclaimed properties belonging to city corporation will be identified. The second phase comprises fencing off these properties and preparing the original documents. The third step will be merged with e-governance project and all the collected documents will be digitised for future perusal.

The first meeting of this project, which was held on Tuesday, also threw up certain startling facts. Over the past few years, the civic body had to completely abandon major projects envisaged in the budget after its own land being encroached upon by private parties and religious organisations. A project to begin a training centre at Beemapally at an area of 3.5 acres was shelved after the officials were told that the land proposed for the project now belongs to a religious organisation.

The idea to start an industrial centre at Pappanamcode at an area of 8.5 acres was cancelled after encroachment was reported on the same site. Recently the city corporation's dream project of having its own petrol pump and a shopping complex at Jagathy was aborted following a notification from the revenue department which said that the land belongs to the revenue department and not to the corporation. Although the land at Jagathy was transferred to the ownership of corporation in the past in return for another piece of land, the civic body did not possess any document to prove this.

The revenue wing also revealed in the meeting that it did not have a register for immovable properties. The officials have been asked to trace the register and submit within a week as part of initiating the project. "This is going to be a taxing job for the civic body. We will also seek the assistance of survey department to garner the records and assess the actual measure of land owned by the corporation," said deputy mayor G Happy Kumar who heads the committee which comprises three councillors and officials of the engineering wing and the revenue wing.

An official associated with the scheme said that the major challenge will be identification of properties in five wards, which had earlier been panchayat wards. None of these panchayats had handed over the asset register before the delimitation process began. "This means that we will have to measure each property from the scratch. Adequate manpower for the project will be another issue," the official said.

A few years ago, the civic body had begun collecting documents during the tenure of J Chandra as the mayor. However, the project was dropped midway after the engineering wing was split into town-planning and engineering wing.