PANAJI
Environment Minister Nilesh Cabral on Monday deliberated with officials of the Environment and other related departments to take stock of the work done till date and evolve mechanisms to expedite final reports of the suggestions and objections to the Coastal Zone Management Plans.
Environment Secretary, Kunal, IAS, Environment Director Dasharath Redkar, who also doubles up as member-secretary of Goa Coastal Zone Management Authority (GCZMA), GCZMA's domain experts and heads of the multiple teams constituted to map and ground-truth all the suggestions and objections met today.
Redkar said, the meeting was an "informal one" and was held to take stock of the groundwork done and draw a roadmap to ensure the balance work is expedited so that the December 31 deadline to submit finalised plans is met.
The government's CZMP finalisation exercise suffered a setback last week when the National Green Tribunal (NGT) rejected its plea for an extension in time beyond the December 31 deadline.
Last week's snub by the NGT has now made the task a daunting one for the government to accomplish so that the CZMPs are finalised and notified by this year end.
It first has to scrutinise all the suggestions and objections recorded during the July public hearings, map and ground-truth them before submitting the verified ones to the Chennai-based Center for Sustainable Coastal Management (CSCM).
CSCM will then finalise the CZMPs before they are forwarded for approval to the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change.
Finalisation of CZMPs has been haunting the Goa government for several years now with greens in Goa closely scrutinizing the process and in fact forcing the cancellation of one process which ended with shoddy draft CZMPs prepared and finalised by the Chennai-based NSSCM in 2018.
The uproar against those plans across Goa then had forced the government to go in for an encore exercise and accordingly marathon public hearings were held in July this year at Panaji and Margao.
Hundreds of objections and suggestions were filed at these hearings and the government had formed multiple teams with officials drawn from multiple government departments dealing with the subjects.
