Reclaiming lands a major hurdle in revival of tanks in TS

Hyderabad: The Telangana government has an upheaval task ahead in reviving tanks as more than one lakh acres of land in about 40,000 tank beds across the State have been encroached upon over in the last six decades.

Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao, recently, had announced that all tanks in Telangana State would be revived. Subsequently, a random survey conducted indicates that water bodies in the major gram panchyats and towns were the main target for land sharks. As a result, tanks shrunk almost to the brink of extinction due to unbridled encroachments by realty developers in all the ten districts of Telangana. In Nalgonda district alone, over 15,000 acres of land was usurped by the local realtors.

A senior official told The Hans India that not a single tank was encroachment-free in the State. Reclaiming encroached lands would be a major task for the government as most of them were under litigation and some of them were regularised by the developers in collusion with the officials from Revenue Department, the official said.

In gram panchayats, the authorities issued farm pattadar passbooks after the encroached lands were shown as agricultural lands by the villagers. The retrieval of such occupied lands would not be an easy task for the government, said the official.

Further, he said that reviving water bodies without reclaiming the original tank bed area would be a futile exercise. Although, the government took the initiative to bring 20 lakh acres under tank irrigation to meet the future demands, however, restoring water bodies to their original full tank level had to be the first priority of the government, the official said.