THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Agriculture Minister V. S. Sunilkumar has warned that stringent action will be taken against paddy reclamation. Within six months, the data bank on the status of land use would be completed using the satellite survey report which was prepared before the Kerala Conservation of Paddy Land and Wetland Act 2008 came into effect.
He blamed the previous UDF government for not completing the data bank. The local bodies, irrigation, agriculture and revenue departments should have taken efforts to complete the remaining 30 percent work of the databank earlier, he added.
The activists have been complaining that it is difficult to prove whether reclamation was done before or after 2008 in the absence of published data. In 2008, the entire village panchayats in the state were supposed to prepare a data bank under each survey. Though most panchayats did so, they were never published.
