Offices of the nine village panchayats abutting the Kakinada Municipal Corporation (KMC) have been witnessing a sudden surge in their day-to-day activities with people in large numbers turning up the offices to get their works done. Be it issue of a birth certificate or approval of a house plan, people from the nine village panchayats are not wasting any time, but lining up at the panchayat office concerned to get their works done at the earliest.
The reason is that the nine panchayats are going to be merged into the KMC very soon with the High Court quashing the petitions filed by the panchayat challenging the merger proposal tabled by the government. The court also directed the State government to make arrangements for the merger of the villages into the municipal corporation by de-notifying the panchayats.
Ramanayyapeta, Valasapakala, Vakalapudi, Indrapalem, Cheediga, Turangi, Swami Nagar, S. Achyutapuram and Ganganapalli Teachers Colony are soon to be a part of the KMC, which is competing with 99 other cities to be in the Top-20 of the Smart City project launched by the Union government. Fears about the possible hike in fee to be remitted and the possible delay in addressing their issues by the municipal corporations, residents of the villages are now literally chasing the panchayat officers.
Plan approval for construction of houses seems to be topped the list of applications being received by the panchayats from the public in all the nine villages. On an average, each panchayat received about 200 applications from the residents seeking house plan approval in the last 10 days and nevertheless to say the middlemen are ruling the roost by collecting ‘mamools’ from the applicants for ensuring their plan to be cleared by the panchayat.
“There are incidents where the middlemen collected Rs. 20,000 to Rs. 30,000 per plan towards the mamool. As people are panic about the delimitation, they are paying the amounts,” says Palivela Veera Babu, ex-sarpanch of Indrapalem village panchayat and secretary of the CPI (M) city unit.
On an average, each panchayat received about 200 applications from the residents seeking house plan approval in the last 10 days
