Late last week the Supreme Court of India granted an interim stay on preventing the Goa government from granting conversion sanads for plots of land that were ‘finally’ identified as private forests by the Thomas and Araujo committees of the Forest Department. At least until the next hearing, which has been kept after four weeks, the Supreme Court decreed that “no further conversion sanad shall be issued in respect of the lands mentioned….”The “lands mentioned” is a total of 855 plots consisting of a total area of 8.64 square kilometres of land in various parts of Goa.
At the centre of the controversy lies the Goa government’s decision to constitute a ‘review’ committee to review the work done by the Thomas and Araujo committees. The Thomas Committee and the Araujo Committee, which incidentally were formed during the term of the BJP government headed by former Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar (2012-2014) and headed by former foresters V.T. Thomas and Francisco Araujo from where they got their names.
The committees were set up during the tenure of Alina Saldanha as forest minister and were continued during the tenure of Rajendra Arlekar who took over from her during the latter part of that term. However, no sooner Vijai Sardesai took over as forest minister in 2017 these two committees were disbanded in March 2018 but submitted their final reports in December 2018.
A subsequent review committee was set up to review the work done by the two committees and despite the two committees reporting a total of 8.64 sq km of private forests (855 sy.nos) as “final” in both north and south Goa, while the rest of the areas identified were marked “provisional”, awaiting further visits and confirmation, the review committee decided to treat the entire work done by the committees as provisional leaving them open to being ‘denotified’ as private forests as has happened in several cases.
Since then there have been more committees and even further review of the area under private forests -- all with the intention to remove as much area as possible from the purview of private forests. All this points to a reluctance to have lands demarcated as private forest -- an attitude that severely threatens Goa’s green hillsides and thickly treed slopes. There is a clear criteria that defines what can be demarcated as private forest and what cannot -- this criteria is not open for negotiation or interpretation.
Much of the ‘review’ work is solely focussed on removing lands and plots of land as private forests. Instead, in times of fast-depleting green cover and increasing heat waves, the state needs more areas to be left untouched instead of being opened for development.
More than anything, the government needs to devise a method to ensure that the land owners who, it must be mentioned, don’t have any automatic right to use their property as they please are able to be suitably compensated for keeping their lands untouched -- via a system of green credits, carbon credits or likewise. The government needs to be thinking of the common good rather than the narrow economic interest of wealthy landowners.
