PANAJI
Snubbed by the National Green Tribunal and its refusal to extend the deadline for submitting the finalised Coastal Zone Management Plans (CZMPs), the Goa government’s environment ministry and related departments will be forced to race against time to compile and prepare the finalised plans before December 31.
On the other hand, greens, who over the last couple of years raised a banner of revolt against the shoddy CZMPs prepared and finalised by the Chennai-based National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management (NSSCM) and forced a revision exercise, fear that the government will rush through the process and ignore significant portions of the hundreds of objections and suggestions that came up through the public hearings held earlier this year.
Interestingly, since July when the marathon CZMP public hearings were held in Panaji and Margao for the two districts and where hundreds of suggestions and objections were filed, the State government has taken the onus of their verification and ground-truthing but the exercise implemented through related government departments has progressed at snail’s pace.
Multiple teams formed to conduct the ground-truthing process have in some cases hardly completed site inspections and accounting for all the objections and suggestions will be an insurmountable task in the next two months.
Goa Coastal Zone Management Authority (GCZMA) member-secretary Dasharath Redkar, however, told The Goan that various government departments are on the job of ground-truthing all that came out of the two July public hearings.
Some of the major areas of concern where dozens of objections and suggestions were made were mapping of sand dunes, marine biodiversity proposals related to fishing community, bundhs and khazan lands, mapping of slopes and topography of hilly regions and mangroves.
Teams of personnel drawn from government departments such as the Water Resources Department (WRD), Land Survey Department, Fisheries Department, Environment Department, Forest among others were formed and allocated work of ground-truthing of the objections and suggestions based on their respective domains.
Greens however have claimed that these teams have managed to complete work only on a minuscule proportion of the objections and suggestions.
“Even in some places where site inspections were conducted, the teams have only worked on selective objections and suggestions. In Calangute for instance, only a few people were called and most of us who had also logged our objections and suggestions at the public hearing were not even intimated,” said Calangute-based activist Roshan Luke Mathias.
“Our departments and teams are on the job carrying out the ground-truthing exercise. All their findings will be compiled and handed over in good time to the Chennai agency which will then prepare the final plans to be submitted to the NGT,” Redkar said, adding that the December 31 deadline will be met.
Meanwhile, post Thursday’s NGT missive to stick to the December 31 deadline, Secretary (Environment) Kunal, IAS, has sent SOSs to all the ground-truthing teams to compile reports of their work done to date and submit these to his office by Monday.
The NGT in its Thursday order has also warned that the salary of the Environement Secretary (Kunal) be held back if the December 31 deadline for submitting finalised CZMPs is not kept.
Meanwhile, Environment Minister Nilesh Cabral has also called a meeting of all connected officials to take stock of the work and to prepare a schedule to move the exercise forward and ensure that the NGT’s December 31 deadline is met.
