The functioning of the special tahsildar office set up at Mattannur for land acquisition for the Kannur airport has come to a standstill owing to inordinate delay on the part of the government to approve the extension of the term of the office.
According to a senior official, it is customary to extend the operating licence of the office every year. The State Cabinet has to approve the term of the office, which ended in December last year.
The smooth functioning of the office is necessary as the land acquisition to expand the length of the airport runway to 4,000 metres has not yet been completed.
As a result of the delay, the 22 employees, many of them deputed here, have not been paid their salary for the last two months. Power connection to the office has also been suspended. So, processing and accessing data from computers is not possible, and most of the time employees are forced to use mobile torch to check documents, officials said.
Three special tehsildar offices in the district are also facing similar problems.
Incidentally, the government has frozen land acquisition procedures at a a time when the airport is in crisis owing to the drop in flight services.
