Land acquisition: LPS to continue for 7 more days

Guntur: As the protests against implementation of land acquisition act continues in the capital region, the CRDA has decided to collect lands under Land Pooling Scheme for another seven days making use of the loopholes in land acquisition notification.

According to norms, final draft notification must be issued after seven days of issuing land acquisition notice and land acquisition under Land Acquisition ACT (LAA) will begin after issuing draft notification. According to the reports, farmers have offered 123 acres on the last two days under LPS due to fear of LAA.

The CRDA officials hope that more farmers would offer lands under LPS and hence have decided to collect lands till LAA final draft is issued to give another chance to farmers to get benefitted with LPS.

Guntur district collector Kantilal Dande on Friday has issued notifications for land acquisition in Pichukalapalem, Abbarajup-alem, Borupalem, Ananthavaram and Tullur of capital region.

The CRDA officials, on the condition of anonymity, said that the government started land acquisition from villages where only few lands have to be collected as it doesn’t want to create any issues by starting land acquisition from Undavalli, Penumaka and other villages where CRDA has to collect huge lands.

They added that anti-LPS landowners/farmers didn't expect that LAA notification would be issued as the government had postponed the LAA notification earlier. Now the government had issued notification which forced the anti-LPS farmers to think twice about their decision, they said.  

Interestingly, on Friday, the CRDA collected 46 acres of lands in which 20 acres was pooled from Undavalli, 10 acres from Penumaka, 5 acres from Rayapudi and 8 acres from Nidamarru which are anti-LPS villages.

Earlier, the anti-LPS far-mers on August 19 and 20 offered 123 acres of lands under LPS in Navuluru, Penumaka, Kuragallu, Nidamarru, Krishnayapalem, Undavalli and other areas of the capital region.

Farmers of Kuragallu, K. Venkateswara Rao, and others lamented that they hoped that LAA would be cancelled, but as the government issued LA notification, they were planning to offer their farmlands under LPS as CRDA agreed to collect lands for the next seven days.