Thiruvananthapuram: After several weeks of inaction, the district administration is finally gearing up to take action against Akkulam Lake reclamation, which has been going on for several weeks.
Apart from serving a single stop memo for name sake, the revenue wing under the district administration has not yet taken any solid action to prevent the land filling of the lake. DC had done a series of reports from ground zero on the illegal activities.
On Monday, Revenue Divisional Officer (RDO) and Sub-collector K Inbasekar along with a team of revenue officials visited the reclamation site and decided to register an FIR to launch a comprehensive probe into the blatant reclamation activities happening at the Lake. Mr Inbasekar told DC that the activities at the Lake site were clear violation of the Wetland Act and notices would be served to the respective owners of the land. He said that the revenue wing would initiate steps to reinstate the wetland and the lake which has been encroached.
“We traced the owners of the site, which is owned by eight parties. Direction has been given to the Village Officer to find out the survey details of the plot. Notices would be served to them for violating wetland act. We are investigating whether they have encroached ‘Puramboke’ land or the lake. If there is any encroachment in government land immediate steps would be taken to remove the land fill and reinstate the site,” said Mr Inbasekar.
Environmentalist C.R. Neelakantan said that the issue would be kept alive and followed up regularly to ensure the protection of the Akkulam Lake. “The people behind reclamation are very powerful and we are in the process of documenting the entire violations. We will pressurise the authorities to take action. Moving court is only the last resort. We are planning for dharna, protest to draw the attention of the government to the illegal activities at the site,” said Mr Neelakantan. He said that there are google maps which clearly reveal the extent of encroachments that had taken place in Akkulam Lake site.
He said that destruction of wetland and reclamation activities were degrading the environment.
“This clearly indicates that we haven’t learnt any lessons from the recent devastating floods. People lost lives because of landslides during the floods. The landslides at many places occurred because of illegal construction and other flawed development activities,” said Mr Neelakantan.
While President of Environment Protection and Research Council (EPRC) Sanjeev S J, who raised the complaint alleged that the authorities are deliberately delaying action. “This has been happening for several weeks. But nobody took any action,” he said.
