Plea in Supreme Court challenges Gadgil, Kasturirangan committee reports, MoEF draft notification on Western Ghats

A plea has been filed in the Supreme Court challenging the constitutional validity of the draft notification issued by the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) concerning demarcation of 56,825 square kilometres as Western Ghats Ecologically Sensitive Area (ESA)..The petition by NGO Karshaka Shabdam, filed through Advocate Suvidutt MS, has challenged the October 2018 draft notification published by the Ministry on ecologically sensitive zones. Through this notification, the area of over 50,000 sq km spread across Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, has been demarcated as the Western Ghats Ecologically Sensitive Area..Apart from challenging the vires of the notification as being violative of Article 21, the plea also seeks directions to the State of Kerala to not implement the recommendations of Western Ghats Ecologically Expert Panel (WGEEP), also known as the Gadgil Committee.It also seeks a direction to the State of Kerala to not implement the recommendations of High-Level Working Group (HLWG) or Kasturirangan Committee. Instead, it is prayed that the recommendations of the Oommen V Oommen Committee be implemented, as it is claimed to be beneficial for Kerala..The Gadgil Committee had suggested that the entire hill range be declared as an Ecologically Sensitive Area (ESA) and further classified 142 taluks as Ecologically Sensitive Zones 1, 2 and 3.In comparison, the Oommen V Oommen Committee report - which took into consideration over 9,000 memoranda submitted by individuals, NGOs, schools, public representatives, farmers’ organizations - recommended change to the clauses of Environmentally Fragile Lands (EFL) in the Western Ghats..The Oommen Committee included satellite survey which covered plantations and estates and mandated stopping of land acquisition according to the Kasturirangan report.It also recommended that farmers should not be stopped from rearing hybrid varieties of milking animals and suggested a grace period of 10 years to shift to organic farming..The petition before the Supreme Court states that the rationale behind issuing the draft notification, “without inclusion of the measures to incentivize green growth advocated by the HLWG and those proposed in the National Agro-forestry Policy, 2014," is questionable.The petitioner organisation avers that instead of allowing people to pursue their livelihood as they have over centuries in consonance with nature, “the intent of the draft notification seems to (be) disrupt lives and discourage agriculture.”.Substantiating how the notification disrupts the right to livelihood, the plea states that proposed non-permissible activity like banning of the red category industries such as hospitals, dispensaries, dairy processing units, hotels, incinerators etc. may have serious repercussions on the livelihood of people in these villages..Assailing the recommendations of the High Level Working Group (HLWG), the petition states that instead of finding and demarcating the ecologically sensitive areas and its boundaries, both the Gadgil and Kasturirangan (HLWG) committees did not “carry out any ground truthing to check the reliability of the ecological sensitivity scores for each grid as finally demarcated by the panel and recommended and thus ended up taking Taluk and village boundaries as the boundaries for ESA.”.Further, it has been submitted that the recommendations under challenge will lead to agriculture being banned, which will directly and indirectly affect the lives of lakhs of Kerala residents, especially those living in these wrongly designated protected areas.“Some of the proposals in WGEEP report are draconian. For example, decommissioning of dams older than 50 years, would leave the state without power in a few years without any alternate solutions in place”, reads the plea..The petition states that in proposing to issue a notification under Section 3 of the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, the MoEFCC has erred in not taking into consideration the reasons behind degradation of the natural landscape in the Western Ghats, viz., wildlife sanctuaries, protected areas, National Parks and reserved forests. It states,“The major reasons for this malady are corruption in the Forest Department, maladministration, mindless conversion of pristine forests into teak/ acacia/ eucalyptus plantations, uninhabited timber smuggling often, sporadic wildfires etc."