THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The dispute between the Agriculture and Local Self-Government departments over the verification of new applications for LIFE Mission, the government's free housing scheme, continues to escalate. While the local self-government department claimed that employees of the agriculture department will turn up for verification of new applications, the agriculture department has maintained that it will not provide agricultural assistants for the verification process.

Earlier, the local self-government department had issued an order deploying agricultural assistants to verify the applications. However, the crisis began when the agriculture department issued an order stating that it will not provide agricultural assistants for non-agricultural purposes. With this, the draft list could not be published on December 1. Following this, the chief secretary called a meeting of top officials and staff representatives from both departments to resolve the issue. However, the meeting, which was supposed to take place on Saturday, got postponed at the last minute. Meanwhile, on the same day, in a meeting held at the CM's office without the knowledge of the agriculture department officials, it was decided to conduct the verification with the help of agricultural assistants. The local self-government department hopes that an order will be issued soon in this regard. This will invalidate the order issued earlier by the Director of Agriculture and force the agricultural assistants to go for verification. In that case, the officials of the agriculture department may launch a strike.

The agriculture department is alleging that panchayat employees were excluded from the verification duty in about 80 per cent of the panchayats. The employees have informed the minister that if the agricultural assistants are deployed for verification, the activities like crop damage assessment, crop insurance and distribution of one crore fruit saplings will come to a halt.