Central nod likely for hill station near tiger haven

With the Centre likely to regularise over 1,000 land deals in the Western Ghats, besides 10 resorts and 215 windmills that have come up in the ecologically sensitive zone, Maharashtra is all set to get another hill station — New Mahabaleshwar — near a recently created tiger reserve.

Updated on: Jun 26, 2012, 23:48:23 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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With the Centre likely to regularise over 1,000 land deals in the Western Ghats, besides 10 resorts and 215 windmills that have come up in the ecologically sensitive zone, Maharashtra is all set to get another hill station — New Mahabaleshwar — near a recently created tiger reserve.

The standing committee of the National Board for Wildlife (NBWL) has agreed to rationalise the boundary of the Koyna Wildlife Sanctuary, now a Sahyadri tiger reserve, subject to a decision of the Bombay HC and the SC-appointed Central Empowered Committee (CEC).

According to a PIL filed by Nana Khamkar in the Bombay HC, rationalisation of boundaries was an attempt to regularise 215 windmills, 10 resorts and 1,200 land deals that had come up in violation of the Forest Conservation Act. “The state government allowed these structures to come up without waiting for rationalisation of the sanctuary boundaries,” it contended.

An environment ministry official, however, defended the decision by saying that the state government will add six times the land removed from Koyna (about 100 sq km) to five different wildlife sanctuaries in the state. Moreover, the decision would be subject to a final view of the HC and the CEC, he added.

Maharashtra had declared Koyna as a wildlife sanctuary in 1985. It comprised 230 sq km of forested area and 198 sq km of non-forested land.

The state’s forest department conducted inspections between 1995 and 1998 to “delete” part of non-forested area from the ambit of the sanctuary.

However, over the years, the government allowed windmills and resorts to come up without deleting them. In 2000, the apex court disallowed deletion of land from national parks and sanctuaries.

Later, in 2004, the state – without getting the Centre’s nod – declared the development of the New Mahableshwar hill station and included 14 Koyna villages in it. In a few years, most of the land in the villages was sold illegally.

In 2010, the state government declared the entire Koyna region as the Sahyadri Tiger Reserve. Though the Forest Conservation Act mandates that taking the opinion of the National Tiger Conservation Authority is mandatory before rationalising boundaries, it was not done.

Environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan said she would take a call on the issue after “returning from Rio de Janeiro by June 28”.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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