the goan I network
PANAJI
Goa’s ‘bhatkars’ (land owners) will have time only up to March 13 (Friday) to lodge their objections against their land holdings being provisionally classified as private forests as identified by the ‘Thomas and Araujo Committee’, the State Level Expert Committee for North and South Goa.
The notice issued by the forest department in mid-February, had invited land owners or occupants in whose land areas are provisionally identified as ‘private forests’ to file their objections or representations along with their ownership documents and address for future communication to the Ponda office of the Deputy Conservator of Forests (Working Plan) Division within a month.
Criteria used by the Thomas and Araujo committee to identify ‘private forests’ thus included continguity of the land with government forest lands, and if in isolation, it should be of a minimum area of five hectares. Also, 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 have been included in the provisional classification done by the ‘Thomas and Karapurkar’ Committee.
The issue of classifying private land holdings contiguous with existing government held forests has been hanging fire for decades. In the 1990s, the HY Karapurkar Committee had conducted a similar exercise but aggrieved landowners had objected and the State government intervened to keep it in limbo.
Intervention of the courts led to the government then constituting the Thomas and Araujo committee to revisit the issue and just when the matter seemed to reach a logical conclusion the government in 2018 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. The committee was also through a notification issued under the Forests Act, was vested with powers to review the classification of private forests doen by the ‘Thomas and Araujo Committee’.
Tiswadi is the only one of the 11 sub-districts where land is provisionally classified as ‘private forest’ is very small with just four survey numbers in the three localities of Gancim, Talaulim and Gaulimaula have got listed.
