Hyderabad: Faced with reluctance by field-level officials of the Telangana State Forest Department to sign off on freshly received podu patta applications, the Tribal Welfare Department has hit upon a novel scheme to legalize the applications by having forest officials submit their facsimile signatures. These signatures have since been scanned and used as images in place of actual signatures of forest officials in the podu patta passbooks that have since been printed, sealed, and delivered to various districts. The passbooks are currently under the custody of the respective district collectors awaiting a final nod from the state government for distribution.
Incidentally, the question of using facsimile signatures on podu title deeds was set to rest way back in December 2008 by the Union ministry of tribal welfare (MoTW). In its letter to the then Andhra Pradesh government’s query on whether district collectors’ signatures can be supplanted with those of revenue divisional officers on podu titles issued to tribals under the Recognition of Forest Rights Act of 2006, the MoTW had made it clear in its letter that all such title deeds must be signed by the district collectors, and not by RDOs, and facsimile signatures cannot be permitted on the title deeds.
The state’s Tribal Welfare Department is the nodal agency for the implementation of the RoFR Act and the issue of title deeds, or podu patta passbooks, as the state government now describes the title deeds as.
The state government originally planned to start distribution of the podu pattas in the last week of February. With this deadline being set, communications between the Telangana State Tribal Welfare Department and the state Forest Department indicate an extreme sense of urgency in collecting facsimile signatures of all District Forest Officers (DFOs).
It was on January 31 that the Forest Department received a letter from the secretary and commissioner of the Tribal Welfare Department with a ‘request’ to ‘communicate’ facsimile signatures of DFOs to enable MeeSeva to ‘fix the same’ and generate PDFs of the passbooks. Acting with rarely witnessed alacrity, the forest department shot off a letter the same morning to all DFOs ‘for immediate necessary action’ and put down the phrase “This may be treated as most urgent” in bold lettering.
While forest officials in the districts in the eye of the brewing fresh podu patta storm were not willing to actually sign and approve fresh claims received on forest land occupied after the December 2005 cut-off date set by the Government of India for title deeds under the RoFR Act, actual signatures were obtained only in one district in Telangana, and that too after local officials were leaned on very heavily by top state government officials. Most forest officials are worried that approving podu patta requests for forest land occupied after the December 2005 cut-off date would put their careers in jeopardy.
