SANGUEM
Irked with the State government’s plan to felicitate around 400 farmers who use water supplied from the Selaulim Dam for several decades, a group of Selaulim evacuees, mostly hailing from the ST community, have threatened to agitate and show black flags to ministers and MLAs attending the felicitation function scheduled at Selaulim Dam on Independence Day.
Adv Anand Gaonkar, who has taken up the cause of the affected families, said the government’s plan was an insult to many families who sacrificed their ancestral lands for the Selaulim Dam but are yet to be provided with promised agricultural and housing plots.
“It looks as if the government is in a mood to tease the affected families rather than devising solutions to end their problems,” said Adv Gaonkar.
Gaonkar informed that at a meeting held last week at Dapodem Bhati, the affected families hailing from ST communities had threatened to lead an agitation and also boycott the coming Lok Sabha elections if their demands remained unsolved.
“However, even after having conveyed their grievances to the government and the need to settle their long-pending demands at the earliest, the government has now planned to felicitate farmers who are using water supplied from the Selaulim Dam, and this is highly unacceptable,” claimed Adv Gaonkar.
“The affected families are not averse to the felicitation function of farmers, but they are opposed to such functions in their backyard when they still wait for their demands to be fulfilled. If the government continues to ignore their grievances then they will be left with no other alternatives but to resort to agitations,” warned Adv Gaonkar, who was accompanied by some of the aggrieved Selaulim evacuees at the news conference.
