Kiran vows to review coast sell-offs

HYDERABAD: Facing flak over the way successive state governments have gifted away valuable tracts of the state’s coastal corridor to private parties, chief minister Kiran Kumar Reddy on Tuesday assured the Assembly that all such memoranda of understandings (MoUs) would be reviewed by a high-level expert committee.
Intervening during question hour, the CM promised to constitute the panel at the earliest.“There is a need to bring a new policy on the utilisation of land by these (ports and industries) companies. I assure the House that government property will not be given away just like that. We will review all allotments and MoUs in the interest of public. The expert committee will look into the use (utilisation) of land and also suggest the quantum of land needed for a specific project. All views of the Opposition will be taken into account before finalising the proposed policy,” the CM said. While this regime’s resolve to see this matter through is suspect, analysts averred that if the CM delivered what he promised then it would in effect negate the decisions taken by the earlier YSR government.
Referring to the ‘exclusive zone rights’ given to three ports — all part of a single consortium — on a stretch of 348 km, Lok Satta member Jayaprakash Narayan said: “It is strange that GOs were issued in blatant violation of rules and that too after finalising the global competitive bid documents. There is a section in the government that feels that they are not answerable to anyone. In one instance, documents show that an MoU has been entered with a foreign country. However, the MoU does not have the initials of any government official of that country. There is every need for government to examine the land allotment policy followed by all previous governments. The concept of ‘exclusive rights zone’ is being followed only in AP and nowhere else in the country.”
Other who participated in the discussion questioned how a single private port was given 26,000 acres when the world’s largest port in Singapore (over 1,186 acres) was handling cargo 50 times the cargo handled across all ports in the country. AP, with the country’s longest coast, handles only 10 million tonnes of cargo annually.