Third VS team in Munnar, demolition not on agenda

Despite the mess the Munnar demolition exercise became before the JCBs ground to a halt...

Despite the mess the Munnar demolition exercise became before the JCBs ground to a halt, Chief Minister VS Achuthanandan on Wednesday announced his Cabinet’s decision to send in the third team to disinfest the hill resort of encroachers.

Government sources say there will, however, be none of the drama and hype in Munnar as earlier, when JCBs and sledgehammers tore down one illegal resort after the other, besides a part of Left front constituent CPI’s office which hosted a tourist resort on its upper floors, watched live on TV across Kerala. This team will merely measure and mark encroachments and issue vacation notices. The Government will take over the illegal constructions on encroached land and later decide what to do with those, sources said.

They added that this time VS, who had defied protests even from within the Left front against his personally handpicking the first team of three headstrong officials to lead the demolition drive—before he succumbed to flak from his own party rivals as well as an angry CPI—had little to do with the team’s selection. The Munnar team will now be headed by Additional Land Revenue Commissioner K M Ramanand, and the only member from VS’s original Munnar team to be retained is IG of police Rishiraj Singh. Idukki District Collector Ashok Kumar Singh and Director (Survey) K Ravindran are other members of the team.

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The announcement of the new Munnar team coincided with original team leader and IAS officer K Suresh Kumar submitting an unqualified apology to the Kerala High Court on Wednesday, after it hauled him up for setting the JCBs loose on a resort that the court had asked not to clobber. It was the appointment of Suresh Kumar, who had had several run-ins earlier with state politicians, as the Munnar team leader, which got VS much of the flak from the Left combine. Suresh had reported sick and walked out of the assignment in a huff after things slided from bad to worse.

After months of sitting idle with no job and no Left minister wanting to have him under their wings, Kumar was posted last month as Managing Director of the State Agriculture Development Bank, a job he did some 10 years ago. Another of that team whose appointment was being keenly opposed within the Left front, Idukki District Collector Raju Narayanaswamy, was shunted out last month, not long after he was instrumental in reporting the involvement of the kin of a Left minister in a landscam there, leading to the minister’s resignation.

VS had sent in a second team led by another IAS man, Land Revenue Commissioner VM Gopala Menon, after Suresh Kumar left, and had announced that evictions would resume in Munnar from August 10. But Menon, who led officials to measure some allegedly encroached land in Munnar, left within a few days on health grounds. Nothing has been happening in the hill resort since, and junior government officials transferred there for the mission have been idling, with no one to lead and direct.