Land Acquisition Begins For Parandur Airport

Chennai:In what could be a setback to the prolonged protest against Chennai’s second airport coming up at Parandur, which has the support of Tamilaga Vetri Kazhagam president Vijay, 19 land owners sold off 17.52 acres of land for Rs 9.22 crore and registered the properties in the name of Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation (TIDCO) on Wednesday at the Kanchipuram Sub-Registrar office.

While the district authorities see the land registration on Wednesday as a beginning of the mandatory land acquisition process, the members of the protest committee that has been demanding the shifting of the site for airport somewhere else say it is a long way to go since TIDCO has to acquire a total of 3,500 acres of land from nearly 2000 landowners.

The protest committee members also claimed that those who have sold their land now do not belong to the villages, where the protests have been raging since 2023. Reports said that all the 19 sellers were graduates and possessed the land in the villages of Parandur, Podavur, Nelvai, Valathur and Ackamapuram. While 11 of them hailed from Chennai and other eight were from the villages.

The protest committee, in its last meeting, after the government announced the increased rates for the land to be acquired, had decided to move the courts to stop the project coming up at the proposed site. Their prolonged agitation that started on the day the government identified the particular site for the airport construction in 2023 took different forms over time

However, with the government going ahead with its plan, they were planning to stop it through legal means when the registrations began on Wednesday. The Kanchipuram district collector said the land registered on Wednesday in the name TIDCO had been sold at the new rates announced by the government.