Capital land move blocked

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Hyderabad: Administrative preparations for the division of the state begun by some enthusiastic senior bureaucrats has not gone down well with those state government employees who are opposed to division and are hoping the evil hour will be put off.
There were instructions to the collectors of three districts — Visakhapatnam, Krishna and Prakasam — to identify large chunks of government land.
Collectors deputed revenue teams which in turn conducted survey of government lands. In Visakhapatnam the officials identified available land of not more than 1,000-1,500 acres in three places.
In Prakasam, huge chunks of government land near the coast and at least 500 acres in the surroundings of Vijaywada and Guntur was ruled out.
Chief Commissioner of Land Administration I.Y.R. Krishna Rao and Revenue principal secretary B.R. Meena said they were unaware of the instructions to collectors.
CS told to probe land plan
Chief Minister N. Kiran Kumar Reddy is said to have asked chief secretary P.K. Mohanty to look into the complaints of the state employees against senior officials carrying out an exercise to identify land for a new capital, especially since the Centre itself has not initiated the division process.
Sources told this newspaper that a delegation of employees from Andhra and Rayalaseema called on Chief Minister N. Kiran Kumar Reddy to register their protest against the Centre’s decision to divide the state. The Chief Minister tried to pacify them and stated that there is nothing official about the division as of now.
“We brought to the Chief Minister’s notice that the planning department officials have been given the responsibility to obtain data on all important issues. We apprehended that the data of employees is also being gathered,” a member of the delegation said.
The Secretariat employees also complained that some officials planned to go to Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand to study the process of state division.