A letter from Union Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia claimed that the government had not received any proposal for a greenfield airport in the district, according to the Rajya Sabha MP.
Digital Desk: Sushmita Dev, a leader
of the Trinamool Congress, claimed on Wednesday that the Assam government
removed big swaths of tea plantations under the guise of building an airport in
the Cachar district.
A letter from Union Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia claimed that the government had not received any proposal for a greenfield airport in the district, according to the Rajya Sabha MP.
A greenfield airport is one that is
constructed from scratch in a new location.
On May 24, Dev wrote to Scindia,
asking if the civil aviation ministry had approved any plans to build an
international airport in Cachar. She had also asked that if the project was
approved, he give her an estimated completion date.
"Imagine ripping through the
tea plantation and evicting those helpless workers in Dolu [tea estate] with
200 excavators," Dev wrote on Twitter.
Scindia's letter to the Trinamool
Congress MP was the second time the Centre denied that any airport project in
Silchar, the Cachar district's capital, had been cleared.
The ministry had replied on May 31
in response to a Right to Information request that it had not received any
proposals for a greenfield airport in the city. Rahul Roy, a native of Cachar,
had filed the RTI application.
The government has given
in-principle clearance to 21 greenfield airports around the country, according
to Amit Kumar Jha, the civil aviation ministry's chief public information
officer. Cachar, on the other hand, was not one of them.
According to reports, on May 12,
Cachar district authorities had begun the process of acquiring around 5,733
acres of land for the airport's development despite the fact that the project
had not been approved.
According to The Times of India,
authorities uprooted about 30 lakh tea bushes for the purpose. The
administration had also deployed a considerable number of security personnel at
the time, as well as enacted Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure in
the region, which prohibits gatherings of five or more people.
Notably, on May 29, the state
Cabinet resolved to give Rs 1 lakh to each of the 1,263 tea garden workers'
families as a "goodwill gesture" for their participation in the
development of Silchar's greenfield airport.
Meanwhile, to oppose the action of
the authorities, the Doloo Tea Estate Save Coordination Committee called for a
protest on June 15.
