Govt file on setting up tiger reserve in Goa is missing, SC mandated panel told
Goa’s principal conservator of forests Kamal Datta said it was a fact that the file containing the tiger reserve proposal is missing
PANAJI: A file on the 2015 plan to establish a tiger reserve in Goa has gone missing, the Central Empowered Committee (CEC), set up by the Supreme Court, was informed at its first hearing, people familiar with the matter said.
At its September 16 hearing in Delhi, the committee heard the Goa government, which has challenged in the Supreme Court the Bombay high court’s order directing them to declare a tiger reserve in Goa’s Mhadei Wildlife Sanctuary and surrounding areas, and the original petitioner, the Goa Foundation, an advocacy group.
At the hearing, Goa Foundation told the committee that a tiger reserve proposal prepared by the forest department was finalised in 2018. But the state government did not notify the said reserve, and the file could not be traced.
Goa’s principal conservator of forests Kamal Datta later confirmed that this was true. “It is a fact that the file containing the tiger reserve proposal is missing. A complaint regarding this was filed before the police back in 2023 by the North Goa Conservator of Forests,” Kamal Datta told HT.
The proposal prepared by the forest department following a recommendation of the National Tiger Conservation Authority and the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests, contained a plan to notify a tiger reserve with a core area of around 750 sq kilometres. According to Goa Foundation’s submissions, it ensured that human habitation was not included in the core area.
“This document indicated that all the major settlements had been scrupulously excluded from the boundary of the tiger reserve. All claims made of vast numbers affected by the tiger reserve were negated by the annexures in the tiger proposal which the Supreme Court empowered committee must request the government to produce,” Claude Alvares of the Goa Foundation, said after the hearing.
Previously, the Goa government, which has appealed against the Bombay high court’s direction in the Supreme Court, submitted before the CEC that “the protected area proposed to be declared a tiger reserve has a huge population of about 1,00,000 inhabitants, spread across several villages and that these people would be most unwilling to be relocated elsewhere.
The state government also told CEC that Goa did not have any resident tigers and even though the 2022 NTCA study found four tigers, the protected area “is only a corridor whereby the tigers transit from Maharashtra to Karnataka or vice versa and the area of Mhadei is only a route which is used by tigers to transit.”
It is a stand that has been contested by Goa Foundation. It said the government was “brandishing extravagant and unsubstantiated claims of 1,00,000 persons (likely to be affected) and that it contained 10,000 (forest rights) claimants, underlining that such figures do not stand the test of scrutiny.
“The proposal would result in a large tiger reserve that would comprise Karnataka and Maharashtra protected areas up to the Sahyadri tiger reserve. Therefore, the argument about the size of the reserve in Goa was not of much significance,” Alvares also said.
The Goa government had told the CEC that “as per the NTCA guidelines, an area of 800-1000 square kilometres would have to be declared as an inviolate space for a tiger reserve.”
Activists stress that the NTCA has, on several occasions, most recently in 2020, recommended the setting up of a tiger sanctuary in Goa at the Mhadei Wildlife Sanctuary.
The recommendation was made in the wake of the deaths of four tigers, a tigress and three adolescent cubs in 2019 in the Mhadei Wildlife Sanctuary. NTCA had also made similar recommendations in 2011 and 2016.
The state government had argued that the NTCA’s recommendations were only “suggestions or advice” and were not binding on the state government.
