The colour is green. Almost a dozen odd hues of green greetyou when you enter the breathtaking hamlet of Budruk. The little village,nestling at the base of the towering Western Ghats, directly pops out of apicture postcard. Womenfolk harvesting the produce, menfolk tilling farmlandsnearer the base of the mountains. Not even a bird can be heard here nor thewind rustling in the air. But there is disquiet.
Septuagenarian Narayan Gaonkar looks on with suspicion as weask if he knows his village will be a part of the buffer zone. “No. It does notapply to us. No one even came to us to tell anything of that sort”, his voicetrails off as he hurries off with a load of firewood on his head. What Gaonkarhides is that half of his village falls under Mhadei Wild Life Sanctuary. GoaGovernment’s plans of Buffer Zones will engulf the whole hamlet of over 40 housesand push it deeper into the forest.
Up ahead as we enter the heart of Budruk, the village looksdisquietingly deserted. All the village elders, men, women, uncles, aunts,grandpas, grandmoms are in the fields. While the women harvest paddy nearer tothe village, the menfolk work on cashew plantations further away into MhadeiWildlife Sanctuary. “Our crops are already under attack from monkeys, wildbison, peacocks and leopards. The forest department is no different”, shoutsMahadev Futigaonkar, across sheets of coconut kernels drying in the Sun.Futigaonkar, better known as Navsau, was a former sarpanch of Hivrem. Aparalytic bout left him incapacitated, but his mind still works overtime toorganise his village for a fresh onslaught in the name of buffer zones.
Far from the cries of the greens to protect Goa’s allegedlyvanishing forests and the Goa Government’s new found zeal to appear politicallyas well as environmentally correct lies a little known truth. This village anda dozen of its like are in reality victims of Section 18 of Wildlife ProtectionAct 1972. For those in these villages, poor, hardworking and often ignorant ofthe law people, there is not much difference between Section 18 (an intent todeclare) or the more famous Section 26A (final declaration) of the same actthat declared forests in Assodem, Codval, Surla, Vainguinim, Zaranim etc as the44.27 sq. km Mhadei Wildlife Sanctuary.
What the forest department or successive governments nevertold them is that their village actually lies on the fringe of an area that isnot declared but about which the government has an intention of constituting asa wildlife sanctuary. Since June 3, 1999 the people of Budruk have been livinga lie that was never explained to them. Worse, the new debate on buffer zoneswill engulf the village further and the villagers fear that they will befurther restricted from carrying out traditional cultivation and farming inthese areas by overzealous forest officers.
Twenty five filometres away on the smooth, winding Valpoi-Molemroad, it is trees and only trees that greet you. The only break from this isthe occasional restaurant by a bridge across the Guleli River and even a minebehind the curtain of trees. But there is dis quiet.
“You talk of security for wild animals but what about themen who dwelled in these forest for ages” says 50 year old Babu Kundo Zore.Zore lives in a smaller hamlet than Hivrem, called Dhangarwada in Malpanvillage. His great grandfather and generations before him lived in the samehamlet. Zore is happy that buffer zones will create the necessary gap betweenman and the wild, “but they are co-existent, symbiotic. Our forefathers used tohunt the wild animals and the animals hunted us too but we co-existed. What ishappening here is, rather than letting that balance of nature remain, thegovernment is raising a compound wall to restrict the wild animals. They arewild because they have freedom of movement so why domesticate them by buildingwalls?” says Zore. But for Zore and hundreds of others like him, about 5000 oddfamilies living in the buffer zone, the question is not whether mines intrudebuffer zones or buffer zones are a kilometer long or 10 kms. Their concern iswhat will happen to their rights as forest dwellers, which already is beingviolated daily by forest department.
The jungles abound with shock and horror stories of forestdepartment officials hounding forest dwellers and there are growing fears thatthe same story is set to repeat. “We have seen how the permission to repair andre-tar the road from Valpoi to Chorla via Jamoti was held up by ForestDepartment” points out Santosh Naik, Panch, Gavarnem. The road would havehalved the distance between Valpoi and Belgaum. Naik fears that Valpoin-Molemroad too might end up becoming a forest road in the buffer zone and get out ofbounds for the residents of the Buffer Zone.
In the buffer zone, for the Forest Department or thegovernment, the fear of the forest dwellers is the key.
Government forests and their protected areas
| Sanctuary | Area (in sq. km) | Area under Section 26 (a)* | Area under Section 18** |
| Mhadei Wildlife Sanctuary | 208.48 | 44.27 | 164.21 |
| Netravali Wildlife Sanctuary | 211.05 | 56.23 | 154.82 |
*Section 26 (a) of The Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972 statesthat a government forest areas has been declared as a sanctuary after anotification issued under section 18 of the Act and the period for preferringclaims has elapsed, and all claims, if any, made in relation to any land in anarea intended to be declared as a sanctuary, have been disposed of by the StateGovernment.
**Section 18 of The Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972 spellsout the State Government’s intention to constitute any area, not comprisedwithin any reserve forest of territorial waters as a sanctuary for which theState Government shall make alternative arrangements required for makingavailable fuel; fodder and other forest produce to the persons affected, interms of their rights as per Government records.
