Adilabad: Nine years on, villagers of Mallapur, Dharmasagar pay for official blunder

Adilabad: 'So near and yet so far'. This is how idiomatically the strange condition of the tribal villagers of Mallapur and Mathura of Dharmasagar in Adilabad district is being described.

The two gram panchayats are administered by two different mandals. It has created a difficult situation for the villagers who are facing the brunt of the official blunder. The gram panchayats are administered by Indervelli in revenue matters. Matters related to Panchayat Raj comes under Sirikonda.

"Nine years have passed by and three collectors have been transferred but our plea to repatriate the villages from Sirikonda mandal to Indervelli mandal is still pending. Our lives have been saddled with stranger issues," said Durva Raju, Mallapur village headman.

"Our continuing efforts have only resulted in education, agriculture, and banking being done in Indervelli mandal, while our Anganwadi workers and teachers need to go to Sirikonda for meetings and work under the MGNREGS," he added.

The sad story of the villagers started in September 2016 when the then-TRS government initiated a reorganization of districts. Some new mandals were created as part of this exercise by clubbing villages from existing mandals.

Mallapur and Dharmasagar had featured in Tejapur gram panchayat in Indervelli at the time of the reorganization of the mandals. The exercise was being conducted by officials in haste to meet the deadline and it resulted in 'mistakes'.

One of the mistakes was to allocate Tejapur gram panchayat to the newly created Sirikonda. "We had no clue of what was happening," said visibly angry Pusam Anand Rao from Mallapur as he recalled the travesty in its initial stages.

"Indervelli is eight km away from our village while we need to travel about 22 km to reach Sirikonda through rough unmotorable terrain or a circuitous route. Traveling to Boath Revenue headquarters is far more cumbersome than reaching Utnoor which is the Revenue headquarters of Indervelli," Anand Rao elaborated.

In 2019, nevertheless, the efforts of the hapless villagers, including several protests, seemed to have borne fruit when the government notified the transfer of Mallapur and Dharmasagar to Indervelli. An order to this effect was issued on October 11 of that year.

However, much to the consternation of the villagers, the order was not implemented in letter and spirit. The Panchayat Raj affiliation of these gram panchayats remained with Sirikonda mandal.

"The peculiar situation evoked an equally peculiar reply from officials. We were told that the affiliation of Mallapur and Dharmasagar with Sirikonda mandal ensured that the number of Mandal Parishad Territorial Constituencies remained odd needed for forming a quorum during meetings," recalled a still perplexed villager.

"Officials told us that the termination of the term of the Mandal Parishad will have the villages transferred back to Indervelli. Nothing has happened so far," Anand Rao pointed out.

The villagers are planning to meet the present Adilabad Collector Rajarshi Shah once again on this issue. "We hope he sets things right," they hoped.