By IANS,
Bhubaneswar : Odisha will launch a special drive soon to provide lands to about 3.5 lakh landless tribals in the state by 2017, a senior official said Friday.
This was decided Friday at a state-level Tribes Advisory Council (TAC) meeting here chaired by Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik at the state secretariat. Around 25 percent of Odisha’s 37 million population is tribal and large numbers of them either do not have land records in their names or are landless.
“The government has decided to provide them lands by 2017,” the state’s Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Development Secretary Santosh Sarangi told IANS.
The special drive will be launched in the tribal sub-plan area, the regions which have majority tribal populations, he said.
About 3.5 lakh people residing in 19,016 villages under 118 blocks will be covered under the drive, he said.
A landless tribal will get about four decimal of homestead land. Besides he or she will be provided about one acre of other types of land subject to availability which he can use for farming, he said.