Team Herald
MARGAO: While admitting that he in touch with an international agency to promote agriculture and more particularly floriculture in Goa, Deputy Chief Minister Vijai Sardessai said a new committee will be constituted with regards to the private forests in the State.
He said during his visit to Israel he had talks with an international co-operative society named, Machau, to promote floriculture in Goa and also create centres of excellence where high quality agricultural products will be produced.
“They have given their inputs and we shall be studying it and coming out with a policy shortly,” he said while also congratulating the Union Finance Minister for making provision for interest free loans for the farmers.
Director of Agriculture Madhav Kelkar said, “An interest free crop loan will be available for the farmers where they have to provide no collateral for a loan of up to Rs 1.60 lakh.”
“Loan up to an amount of Rs 3 lakh will be given as short term loan which has to compulsorily be paid within a year,” he said adding that a term loan of Rs 5 lakh will be given which is repayable in five years.
FOREST
As Forest Minister Vijai said a new committee will be constituted shortly to prepare a fresh report on the private forest in Goa as there were many anomalies in the report submitted by the previous committee that was appointed to review the Sawant Karapurkar report.
He said as a minister he does not agree with the stratified random sampling undertaken by the Forest Department which used 35 random samplings to identify the private forests in Goa and said he also disagreed with the five per cent sampling intensity which he said was assumptive.
He said the earlier report is being rejected because of these two samplings and also because of the fact that the concerned party was not given a hearing or there was no public consultation.
He said while Centre has said that 33 per cent of the area should be under forest cover, Goa has 36 per cent of its area under forest and hence is ranked amongst the top 10 States in India for forest cover. Besides, he said Goa has 60 per cent tree cover.
COCONUT TREE
CUTTING
Vijai pointed out that the permission to cut the coconut trees in Seraulim was given by the Forest Department before he took over the department and further said there was nothing wrong in it.
“Coconut trees cannot be transplanted after they cross certain age and height and that was the case why permission was given to cut them,” he said while pointing out that the trees had grown quite tall and could not be transplanted as it would have been difficult to transport them.
