HC pulls up state on farm land rates

HYDERABAD: The state government was pulled up by the Hyderabad High Court on Monday for its failure to revise and notify land rates before acquiring them from farmers. The bench of Acting Chief Justice Ramesh Ranganathan and Justice A Shankar Narayana asked the state and Mahbubnagar district collector to file a counter within a week. "Tell us how much time would you take to comply with the requirement of revising the land values as mandated by the new land acquisition Act," the bench told advocate general (AG) K Ramakrishna Reddy. The bench was dealing with a public interest petition filed by former MLA and Congress leader M Kodanda Reddy who accused the Telangana government of resorting to acquiring lands under the new land acquisition Act without doing what it ought to do under the same Act.