THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, May 11: The Kerala Government has sent a Vigilance report to the High Court containing alleged violations on the part of a 10-member group to take over around 250 acres of unassigned government cardamom land at Anaveratti in Devicolam, Idukki.

The report indicts, among others, former revenue ministers K M Mani and P S Sreenivasan, Revenue Board member D Babu Paul, retired revenue secretary MGK Murthy and former Revenue Board Secretary Sajan Peter.

The report states that the group initially wanted to get pucca pattayams before selling it off in bits at lucrative prices. They obtained possession certificates from a deputy tehsildar in 1993 after getting a case of encroachment booked under the Land Conservancy Act by the deputy tehsildar. The case against Sreenivasan states that he had used court `stays' to frustrate efforts of revenue officials in evicting the `encroachers'. Mani, who succeeded Sreenivasan as Revenue Minister, presided over the Government decision on assigning the 250 acres to the applicants.

Paul, on the other hand, was found to have misinterpreted revenue laws and assigned the entire 250-acre stretch. Murthy and Peter were also aware of the happenings and were careless in discharging their duties, the report states.

What prevented the implementation of the land assignment to the group led by one Johnson was the tehsildar's reluctance to co-operate with the Government. The claimants, armed with the Revenue Board decision, approached the High Court for `justice'.

Justice K S Radhakrishnan, however, noticed discrepancies in the `assignment' and directed the Government to probed it by a competent authority.

The Vigilance Directorate, which was entrusted with the task, went into the entire gamut of the issue and unearthed the decades-long efforts by the claimants to take-over the land from the Government. The report was whetted by Additional Chief Secretary (Home), M Mohan Kumar, who is also the Vigilance Commissioner.

The report states that the original applicant for the land was a certain K T Joseph. However, it was one Antony from Alappuzha who encroached upon the land way back in the '30s and tried in vain to regularise it. Subsequently, in the '60s, Joseph, who was the MD of Nellithanam Rubber Products, approached the High Court with a request to regularise the land in his name. The court rejected it.

The Government retrieved a portion of the land from the `encroacher' in the late '70s. Later, the issue attracted media attention when Joseph and some of his relatives allegedly felled trees from the property.

The endless litigations resulted in the land changing hands.

Johnson and some of his friends `purchased' the land and sought to regularise it. They made the first attempt in 1988. Presenting themselves as landless labourers, around 40 of them approached the Government for one or two acres each. Mani, Sreenivasan's successor, later provided the claimants time to fight the department's attempts to throw them out. Finally, the Revenue Board decision came in 1995, assigning what was hitherto considered `unassignable' to Johnson and company, which the tehsildar refused to implement. The rest is recent history.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.