Dharmendra demands all-party meet on Odisha-AP border row

Bhubaneswar: Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan has asked chief minister Naveen Patnaik to convene an all-party meeting on the ongoing border disputes with neighbouring Andhra Pradesh.
In a letter addressed to Naveen on Monday and released to the media on Friday, Dharmendra asked the chief minister to review the progress being made by an inter-state committee to resolve the issues and inform the parties about the same, besides development activities undertaken in the border villages.
“Irrespective of party lines, all political parties agree unanimously on the development and protection of Odia interests in these border villages,” Dharmendra wrote.
Seeking the chief minister’s personal intervention in addressing emerging issues in the border villages of south Odisha, particularly in Kotia panchayat in Pottangi block of Koraput district and Manikapatna in Gangabada panchayat of Rayagada block in Gajapati district,
Dharmendra pointed out that administrative outreach by the Andhra Pradesh government in these villages has been reported in the past few days.
“This illegitimate and unfortunate outreach by Andhra Pradesh government is now not only confined to Kotia, but is also gradually spreading to other villages in south Odisha,” the Union minister wrote, suggesting that Odisha should take the local population and organizations into confidence and address their development issues to prevent people staying in bordering villages from getting lured by the Andhra Pradesh government.
Dharmendra wrote that administrative face-offs and disputes may create disharmony for people living in these areas and hinder the development of these villages and derail the ongoing development process.
The BJD said the Union minister should impress upon the central government to clearly demarcate the inter-state boundary so that there is an early and permanent solution to the dispute. “While adjudicating the Odisha-Andhra dispute, the Supreme Court had said in 2006 that only Parliament can determine the territorial boundaries of the states. Being a Union minister, Dharmendra should take up the matter with the Centre,” BJD’s Koraput district unit president Iswar Chandra Panigrahi said.
Panigrahi said people of all the contentious villages are fully aligned with Odisha socio-culturally and the state government has been taking all possible steps for their development.