PANAJI
The National Green Tribunal has rejected a plea filed by the Goa Foundation that the reports filed by the second review committee constituted by the Goa Government should be rejected and that the survey numbers which were previously identified as private forests in the villages of Dabolim, Chicalim, Sancoale and Cortalim should be reinstated.
The Foundation had challenged four interim reports that the second review committee had filed before the Goa government that reduced the area to be identified as private forests that were earlier upheld by the NGT and appeals against which were rejected.
The NGT nonetheless ruled that “in order to take extreme precaution that no-one suffers on account of errors in identification of the private forest area, the areas, which were finally identified as private forest area by the T&A Committees, if any area out of that is required to be excluded as per review being made by RC-II, the said area should be got verified physically with respect to all three criteria laid down for determination of the private forest cited above by us. Till the final decision is taken with respect to whether the area being excluded from the list of being treated as final forest land by the RC-II which was finalised by T&A Committees as private forest, in keeping with our direction, no permission shall be granted by the State Government for any kind of development work, in the said survey numbers.”
The National Green Tribunal had, back in 2018, ordered the Goa government to notify 46 square kilometres of land as ‘private forest’. An appeal in the Supreme Court against the NGT’s order was rejected.
However, the Goa government appointed yet another review committee (RC II) to further review the survey numbers demarcated as private forests and on the basis that the previous survey (by the Thomas and Araujo committees) was done on the basis of ocular evidence and the present method of using Forest Survey of India data.
After the review, however, RC-II has reported that after enumeration through sampling, the approximate area qualified for private forest is 25 sq. kms, far less than the 46.11 sq km that the NGT had ordered.
The government sought to justify the reduction.
“The 46.11 sq.km. area accepted by the NGT included 41.2 sq.kms. area demarcated by the State level demarcation team and 4.91 sq.kms. area demarcated by RC-I, which had used satellite image. As the methodology of RC-I was an improvement over the methodology followed by the state level demarcation team, the methodology followed by RC-II is an improvement over that followed by RC-I, making it more technically sound and freer from human biases,” the government had submitted before the NGT.
The government also claimed that “there is substantial curtailment of rights due to identification of any land as private forest, wherein Forest Conservation Act, 1980 would be applicable, it is not fair to declare any area as private forest merely on an ocular basis.”
“In view of this, RC-II decided to review ocularly finalised areas i.e. all those areas for which plans prepared as well as excluded on an ocular basis by T&A Committees, following the same methodology through which other areas are reviewed as the answering respondents could not discriminate between finalised survey numbers and non-finalised survey numbers,” the government told the NGT.
The area finalised in all respects as 2.87 sq.km.(in 4th report). This is an ongoing process. After the 5th report, the area finalised in all respects has increased to 3.32 sq.kms For the remaining area, as per approved methodology, scrutiny, hearing of affected persons and 100% enumeration, if affected persons insist is required before finalising it, the government also said.
The Goa Foundation however alleged that it has come to know that State authorities have been surreptitiously granting Conversion Sanads and Development Permissions for some of the plots excluded from forest by the interim reports, which cannot be permitted unless and until this Tribunal approves the consolidated report as and when it is available and submitted for consideration.
“In our view, the Authority from which the power emanates to the Committee herein is the Government of Goa, which had constituted the T&A Committees for identification of the private forest laying down in the notification the procedure to be adopted, which is quite extensive, but even then the errors being there, could not be ruled out. Therefore, in case some complaints were received from some corners, for their correction, it cannot be said that the Government would not have power vested in it to constitute a fresh Committee for the evaluation of the work done by the earlier Committees afresh,” NGT bench of Dinesh Kumar Singh and Vijay Kulkarni, said.
“Looking at the fact that the procedure which is being adopted by RC-II is quite extensive and time consuming, which would require a huge amount of manpower as well, it is likely that the completion of the work would take some time. We expect that the Committee should complete its task within one year,” the NGT also said, adding that till such time, none of the survey numbers can be divested of their status of private forest.
