PANAJI
Over 36 per cent of the survey numbers identified as private forest by the Thomas and Araujo Committees have been removed from the Private Forest areas by the State government appointed Review Committee after failing to meet the criteria set to determine it as private forest.
As per the report of the Review Committee, submitted to the government, the Thomas and Araujo Committee -- constituted for North and South Goa -- had identified a total 3349 survey numbers as private forest. Of these, the Review Committee, through eight interim reports, has excluded 1,225 survey numbers for failing to qualify under private forest criteria.
The State government criteria to identify private forests is that the area should be contiguous to government forest lands and, if in isolation, the minimum area identified should be 5 hectare and the canopy density should not be less than 0.4. The third criterion is that 75% of the tree composition of such lands should be of forestry species.
Last year, in two separate orders, the government had notified 45.5 sq kms and 46.1 sq kms of area in the State as private forest in compliance with an order by the National Green Tribunal (NGT). The committee under the Chief Conservator of Forest (CCF) too has identified an additional 55.57 sq kms of area to be notified as private forest.
The National Green Tribunal, through its judgment dated September 12, 2023, had asked the State if any out of the total area identified by the two committees, need to be excluded, to ensure no one suffers on account of errors in identification of forest areas, should be done after proper physical verification with respect to all the three criteria laid down for determination of the private forest area.
“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 Review Committee, no permissions shall be granted by the government for any developmental works in those survey numbers,” the NGT had said.
Sources said that based on the NGT directions, the review committee reviewed the survey numbers through specific composition, canopy density and area criteria enumerated and recorded by the field committee, by corroborating with Google images, tree felling permissions, forest conservation cases and others.
The committee said that despite field constraints, efforts were taken up to complete the review work in a time bound manner.
