TEAM HERALD
teamherald@herald-goa.com
PANJIM: The Goa government, has criticized the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), alleging that it is trying to force the recommendations of the K Kasturirangan-led working group on the Western Ghats, on it. The government argued that the report did not reflect the ground realities.
Forest Minister Alina Saldanha, in a letter to the MoEF, has accused it of pushing the Kasturirangan committee report findings down the Goa government’s throat, despite ‘strong reservations’ and alleged that the working group had not consulted the state government before submitting its recommendations about the Goa region of the Western Ghats to the centre.
“The state government has taken exception to the said unilateral act of the ministry… Such recommendations, which have serious social, economic and fiscal implications and which, in a manner of speaking, impinge on the authority of the state government, cannot be unilaterally arrived at without the state government accepting the same,” she said in her December 6 letter.
In the letter addressed to Union Minister for Environment and Forests Jayanthi Natarajan, Saldanha said that the Kasturirangan committee’s data was not authentic and did not reflect the ground realities in the area of the Western Ghats range located within Goa’s borders.
“The state government had mentioned that the database that has been relied upon for habitat continuity… is not authentic and is not based on the situation existing on the ground and that further careful work is needed to identify ecologically sensitive areas of the state… It clearly shows that the calling for comments and feedback were a mere formality as the concerns of the state government have neither been considered nor discussed,” she said.
The ISRO chief Kasturirangan had been roped in by the MoEF to head a 10-member high level working group to advise the central government on the recommendations made by the Madhav Gadgil-led panel of experts on conservation in the Western Ghats.
The Western Ghats is a UNESCO-recognised natural heritage site comprising a contiguous forested mountain range which stretches from southern Gujarat to Kerala.
While the Gadgil report recommends stopping large scale economic activity and mining in the region, the Kasturirangan report opens up two thirds of the region for exploitation, at the same time recommending strict conservation in the remaining third of the Western Ghats region.
The state government has been continually opposing both the Madhav Gadgil as well as the latter Kasturirangan committee reports on the same grounds that they have not spoken to the grassroots — a view that Gadgil has taken strong exception to.
“The state government would further like to state that the ministry, it seems, is seeking to regulate land use by the said directions, when land is admittedly a state subject under the constitution,” the letter concludes.
