Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant returned from Delhi last week after meeting a bunch of ministers among them was the newly appointed Minister for Environment, Forests and Climate Change Bhupendra Yadav. Among the issues, he discussed with Yadav was the notification of villages lying along the Western Ghats and eco-sensitive villages -- an exercise that was begun more than a decade ago by the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) headed by Madhav Gadgil.
More than a decade down the line the final notification is yet to be issued -- thanks in large part to states like Goa that have consistently opposed marking villages as eco-sensitive zones, a move that would prohibit large scale projects in the villages. During his visit to Delhi, Sawant was at it again. By his own admission, among the issues he discussed with the newly inducted minister was to reduce the number of villages in Goa to be marked as ESA to 26.
The Madhav Gadgil report had suggested that 99 villages be marked as eco-sensitive and damaging activity be banned. Most of the villages in the present list submitted by Sawant are already in the wildlife sanctuaries and thus already protected thereby reducing the entire exercise to a farce. “We have requested him to remove as many villages as possible from the ESA,” Sawant said. This, he said, was because only these many villages met the criteria based on continuity (with existing protected forest), height and forest species.
Little did he know that a few days later words would come back to bite him. Goa witnessed its worst flooding in at least four decades when on Thursday and Friday village after village especially those along the foothills of the Western Ghats suffered a deluge that brought down houses, ruined cropland and took lives and livestock. The trauma of the deluge will be borne disproportionately by those who suffered immeasurable losses on account of the flooding. For the rest and the moneyed, it will be just a passing concern.
It is no doubt that deforestation -- no matter the purpose be it for roads and other infrastructure, for dams or even for agriculture -- is the primary cause of flooding. A forested hill has many times more capacity to absorb rain than a denuded or worse a paved patch. Instead of encouraging the practice of ‘leaving nature alone’ an active culture is promoted in which every patch of nature and wilderness is ‘tamed’ or domesticated in the name of ‘development’ or local interests.
It appears that despite floods becoming an annual affair now, the Goa government persists with a narrow-minded vision of choosing to completely ignore the mounting evidence around us that the path we are currently on is going straight off a cliff. The attempt to ensure that fewer villages as possible are included as eco-sensitive sounds completely tone-deaf and devoid of reality.
If the government had any sense of responsibility it would do its utmost to educate and inform villagers of the need to preserve the hills and floodplains while also simultaneously offering them an alternate source of livelihood or sustenance without which all talk of environment preservation will be meaningless.
