Thodupuzha: This is what irony looks like! He has issued pattayams (title deeds) to hundreds of people, but now is knocking on all doors seeking title deed to his ancestral property.
Former Devikulam deputy tahsildar M I Raveendran, 70, has been running from pillar to post for the past few years to prove the legal ownership of the four-acre land which he received as his share of the family’s ancestral property at Peringassery near here.
Raveendran became a controversial figure after he issued 530 pattayams in nine villages in Devikulam taluk, which later came to be known as Raveendran Pattayams, while serving as the deputy tahsildar, allegedly by manipulating an order of the Land Assignment Committee.
He was entrusted with the task of issuing title deeds by the then Idukki district collector V R Padmanabhan with an order containing a proviso to exercise all the powers enjoined on the particular post.
However, the Revenue Department inadvertently missed to publish the collector’s order in the gazette to validate it through statutory regulation. As a result, he was legally disqualified to issue title deeds in his additional capacity as tahsildar.
The issue snowballed into a controversy after ‘Raveendran Pattayams’ were deemed illegal by special officer K Suresh Kumar, who headed the Special Task Force (STF) for evictions and demolitions in Munnar in 2007 when V S Achuthanandan was the chief minister.
“The CPI obtained title deed to a 7-cent plot to construct the party office by showing its former state secretary P K Vasudevan Nair as being a farmer. Present power minister M M Mani was the CPM’s district secretary when the CPI applied for the title to a 25-cent property on the ground that it was for agriculture, but it was later used for commercial purposes. But now I’m being haunted for all those deeds,” Raveendran says.