the goan I network
PANAJI
Worried Goan land owners got a breather of sorts as the authorities have extended the deadline for them to file objections to their properties or portions thereof provisionally classified as ‘private forest’ by the State-level expert committee for North and South Goa.
The deadline was earlier March 13 but with hundreds of land owners lining up to register their objections at the Forest Department’s Ponda office of the Deputy Conservator of Forests (Working Plan) Division, the personnel there were unable to deal with the workload.
Some of the landowners and their representatives who had queued up to present their objections said they had to spend the whole day waiting in the serpentine queues to file their documents.
As per the procedure laid out by the forest department, the objections in writing had to be filed accompanied by ownership documents and residential address for future communication. Personnel deputed to receive the documents were overwhelmed by the sheer number of people who turned up to register their objections, one eye-witness told ‘The Goan’.
Lands privately owned but contiguous with forest lands held by the Government were classified as private forests by multiple expert panels since the mid-1990s. The ‘Thomas and Araujo’ committee was the latest of these which went by the criteria of continguity of the land with government forest lands, and if in isolation, parcels of holdings of a minimum area of five hectares.
Other criteria it adopted included that 75 per cent of the tree composition on the land had to be of forestry species and the canopy density should have been greater than 0.4.
Areas in hundreds of distinct survey numbers located in all the 11 talukas of the State were provisionally listed as private forests in the classification done by the ‘Thomas and Araujo’ Committee which was designated by the State government as the ‘expert committee’ for both the districts under relevant provisions of the Forest Act.
In 2018, however, the government scrapped the findings and instituted a public consultative exercise through the Forest Secretary to consider objections and modify the report.
The move, authenticated by a Cabinet decision under the late Manohar Parrikar, however drew the ire of the National Green Tribunal (NGT) which slapped a Rs one-crore fine for the delay in finalising the report.
Subsequently, another committee headed by Additional Collector (Revenue) Anthony D’Souza was tasked with the job of closing the issue by ascertaining the views of the landholders whose areas were found to be classified as private forests.
