MARGAO
With thousands of claims under the Forest Rights Act pending with the government, a tribal has resolved to take up the cudgels for the forest dwellers and has decided to file an intervention application in the Supreme Court on behalf of the Traditional forest dwellers from the state.
At a day-long workshop on community forest rights organised by Gakuved Federation in association with Directorate of Tribal Welfare for Scheduled Tribe Forest Dwellers and Forest Rights Committee members constituted under Forest Rights Act, 2006, members of the Forest rights Committee raised their anger why thousands of petitions filed by the Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers and hundreds of other community claims are pending since 2012.
The participants lamented that the authorities are misinterpreting the Act and Rules made thereunder and deliberately purposely keeping the files on hold and rejecting them citing no reason.
The participants raised questions how can a Collector reject any claim on technical grounds when all powers regarding the same are given to gramsabha under the Act. “As of now, the Goa government has not even settled 10 per cnet of the total claims filed for which District Collector and the Tribal welfare department is solely responsible”, GAKUVED Federation general secretary Rupesh Velip said.
It was resolved to challenge the decision of South Goa Collector for rejecting the individual claims on technical grounds without any justification. Gakuved legal team will legal case in the matter.
It was further decided to assist villagers to Convene gramsabha to receive fresh claims of left out
forest dwellers who had not filed it till today due to lack of clarity on the Act.
It was further resolved to prepare and file Community Forest Resource claims of all the forest dwelling Goan Villages.
Gazetted officers/ experts, including Subhodh Kulkarni (Community Forest Rights expert from Maharashtra state), who worked on CFRA in Maharashtra, Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, North East, Odisha, Karnataka and Goa, Ajav Gaude( Deputy Collector(Revenue) North Goa, Shankar Gaonkar (Director of Sports Authority of Goa & who served as Deputy collector and Yogini Acharya (Asst Director Directorate of Tribal Welfare) were present at the workshop.
