Visakhapatnam: Special teams to begin survey of land records

Visakhapatnam: The tampering of land records by land grabbers in Vizag city and others parts of the district has snowballed into the biggest land scam in Andhra Pradesh. The district administration has decided to take up a land survey drive, and it has set a target of six months to get all the land records in order. District collector Pravin Kumar and joint-collector G. Srijana have accepted that some people may have tampered with land records of the Madhurawada and Kommadi areas of Vizag city in order to benefit land grabbers and that some records have gone missing.

“We have formed six special teams to conduct the land survey in Vizag city. A survey has been taken up in Kommadi, it will be completed by next week. The Madhurawada land survey will be taken up in the next phase. The teams have been collecting data and tallying it against the records at the district collector’s office and the records at the concerned tahsildar’s office,” the joint collector said.

A major challenge for the revenue teams is to ascertain the details such as the link documents for the acres of land from 1956 for SFA (settlement fair adangal) and from 1920 for RSR (resurvey settlement register). “The officers said that if they established the link between documents, they could easily ascertain the extent of government land, the extent of land allotted to various departments, and the extent of land grabbed by others,” the joint-collector said.

Drones to be used for the survey:  The joint-collector said that after obtaining all the records, they would carry out geo-fencing of all the government land. He said this would be done by obtaining the geo coordinates of the land. “We are also chalking out plans to deploy drones to survey the land and compare the actual land to the existing Google image, to observe changes,” he said.