The Poonjar lease, the Devicolam taluk and the Act that resumed Munnar's lands

Background

The Kerala High Court's Munnar Bench has proposed a Special Task Force to carry out the recommendations that government committees have made on illegal encroachments in Munnar, Vagamon and nearby areas of Idukki district. The land those recommendations are about came to the Government through a single State Act. The Kannan Devan Hills (Resumption of Lands) Act, 1971, Act 5 of 1971, applies to the revenue village of Kannan Devan Hills in the Devicolam taluk, which the Act places in the Kottayam district as the districts then stood. Its preamble recites that the Poonjar Chief had leased the village to John Daniel Munroe for coffee cultivation, that the lessor's rights passed to the Travancore government, and that Kerala succeeded to them. From the appointed day the possession of all land in that village stood transferred to the Government, free from all encumbrances, and the rights of lessees and mortgagees in it were extinguished. The Act kept plantations and buildings out of that vesting, except those belonging to trespassers, along with play-grounds, burial and burning grounds, land in the possession of a government or of the State Electricity Board, and so much of a lessee's own cultivation as was within the ceiling limit applicable to him. A plantation holder who needed resumed land for the plantation had sixty days from the Act's publication in the Gazette to apply to the Land Board set up under the Kerala Land Reforms Act, whose order on the extent needed is final.