This was discussed at meeting held with the department officials at the district collectorate chaired by South Goa deputy collector Ajit Panchwadkar.
Assuring that applications for land partition and land conversion would now not take more than 2 months to be completed provided there were no objections, Panchwadkar said the public should take benefit of the ACT as the authorities are liable to face a strict penalty if they don’t meet the deadlines.
“Following the recent notification from the government on the ACT, we convened this meeting as there are 31 services that come under the collectorate” said Panchwadkar
He explained that as per section 61 of the act there is a fixed time limit from the time their offices receive the application wherein they have to issue the notices within 5 days to the departments concerned.
Panchwadkar added that the respective department, in the case of land partition , the land survey department is bound to clear the matter within 30 days.
He added that there were hundreds of such pending applications with the land survey some were a year or two old.
He further pointed out that in the case of land conversion, from the time we receive the applications they ask for reports from the forest department, TCP, ISLR , mamlatdar and departments concerned within 20 days from the time the matter is communicated to them via notices.
Panchwadkar said at the meeting the officials of these departments expressed their problems and pointed out that the collectorate does not send reports in time and that the reports are stuck for a long time. There were also cases where the party applications do not follow it up.
“From now on we will communicate to the departments instead of sending it through the applicants and see that it is sent back to us within 20 days. After ten days thereafter we are supposed to take a decision” said Panchwadkar
The third purpose of the meeting was to discuss the operations of the flying squad that is charge of complaints under section 17A and 17B of the TCP ACT in connection hill cutting and land filling.
“We wanted to know the status of all cases booked so far. In the sense that in how many cases had the TCP filed FIRs under section 17A and 17B and in how many cases was land restored back,” said Panchwadkar.
The deputy collector explained that they had received the reports from Margao and Canacona and were waiting for the report from Quepem and after receiving all the reports, they would go through the data and take corrective measures.
“There are roughly 300 odd cases from the year 2012. We need to see the effectiveness of the existing mechanism and to see how well it works,” said Panchwadkar.
The deputy collector told the TCP officials that the flying squad would be more active only on non-working days.
“Merely because the flying squad is constituted does not absolve the TCP from their routine in respect of taking action. We made it clear that they do not have to wait for the flying squad. Without taking assistance from the flying squad they have powers to act” added Panchwadkar.
