No quarrying in ESAs till biodiversity board report gets nod: government

K.C. Gopakumar
KOCHI,  
The Hindu, October 25, 2014 

The State government on Friday informed the Kerala High Court that if any quarrying operations were allowed in the ecologically sensitive areas (ESAs), it might adversely affect the issue of the final notification based on the Kerala State Biodiversity Board report by the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF).

In a statement, the State government said that the Department of Mining and Geology could not renew the permits of quarries before the notification was finally approved and notified by the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests.

The government was taking all earnest efforts to get it notified.

NGT directive

It said that the renewal applications as well as similar permits were not considered not just due to the directive of the National Green Tribunal (NGT) but mainly because of the fact that the areas where quarrying was taking place were located in the ESAs identified in the Western Ghat region by the High-Level Working Group constituted by the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests.

The tribunal had made it clear that the directives of the MoEF would remain operative until the Union Ministry finalised and notified the eco sensitive areas as recommended by the government.

However, quarrying outside the ESA was allowed since the direction was not binding on the non ESA villages.

MoEF directives

In fact, the directives of the MoEF mandated States stopping of quarrying operation in ESA villages on expiry of the permit period.

The statement was filed in response to a batch of writ petitions filed by various quarry operations challenging the government decision not to renew licences of quarrying located in the ecologically sensitive areas.

 

Read more »

Report on ESA mapping to be submitted next week

T. Nandakumar 
Thiruvananthapuram,  
The Hindu, October 12, 2014

With Chief Minister Oommen Chandy scheduled to meet Union Minister for Environment and Forests Prakash Javadekar next week, the Kerala State Biodiversity Board (KSSB) has fast-tracked the preparation of a report on the demarcation of ESAs (Ecologically Sensitive Areas) in the 123 villages identified by the K. Kasturirangan Committee for conservation of the Western Ghats. The office of the Chief Minister confirmed that Mr. Chandy would meet Mr. Javadekar in New Delhi on October 16.

The talks are likely to centre on the exclusion of human settlements and agricultural land from the ESAs demarcated by the High-Level Working Group (HLWG) led by Mr. Kasturirangan.

Oommen V. Oommen, KSSB chairman, said the fine-tuning of the ESA maps was in the final stages.

He said the work was expected to be submitted to Mr. Chandy before he leaves for New Delhi. The block-level cadastral maps demarcating the ESAs are being electronically stitched together to prepare village-level maps.

A report indicating the ESA and non-ESA areas within each survey number is also being prepared.

Revised draft

The Ministry of Environment and Forests has sought the report for inclusion in the revised draft notification on the Kasturirangan committee, to be issued shortly.

The KSBB had taken up the job of fine-tuning the cadastral maps after paucity of funds forced the Kerala State Remote Sensing and Environment Centre (KSREC) to drag its feet on a project to digitize the ESA maps and convert them to the GIS (Geographic Information System) format.

The cadastral-level maps, with different colour codes to indicate forests, residential areas, waterbodies and rocks, were prepared following a draft notification issued by the MoEF in March redefining the territorial extent of the ESAs in Kerala.

Earlier, the Kasturirangan Committee had earmarked 13,108 sq km across 123 villages in Kerala as ESA.

Read more »

Western Ghats: Ecologically Sensitive Areas maps to be digitised

T. Nandakumar
Thiruvananthapuram,  
The Hindu, August 31, 2014 

With the Central government informing the National Green Tribunal of its intention to implement the report of the K. Kasturirangan committee on the Western Ghats, the Kerala government is gearing up for the final phase of the exercise to demarcate Ecologically Sensitive Areas (ESAs) in the State.

The Kerala State Remote Sensing and Environment Centre (KSREC) has got down to the task of preparing digitised maps showing the extent of the redefined ESAs in the 123 villages identified by the High Level Working Group (HLWG) led by Dr. Kasturirangan. Paucity of funds, however, threatens to bog down the project.

The Environment Department has reportedly turned down a request from the KSREC for an assistance of Rs.14 lakh to cover the expenses involved in the preparation of the cadastral maps earlier this year. The Kerala State Remote Sensing and Environment Centre KSREC, an entity under the Planning Department, has been asked to mobilise funds from its own kitty.

Following a draft notification issued by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) in March, the KSREC had prepared cadastral maps redefining the boundaries of the ESAs.

Colour-coded maps

The colour-coded maps demarcating forests, residential areas, waterbodies, and rocks were scanned, electronically stitched, and uploaded onto the website of the Kerala State Biodiversity Board (KSBB).

“The cadastral maps are only scanned sheets with field-level data copied onto survey maps. They need to be digitised and converted to the GIS (Geographic Information System) format to enable calculation of the area, based on survey number,” a scientist associated with the mapping project said. KSBB Chairman Oommen V. Oommen said that the MoEF had directed the State government to prepare a report on the cadastral-level maps.

This report would be uploaded onto the Ministry’s website along with the final notification expected to be published by mid-2015.

A team of officials from the MoEF regional office at Bangalore were expected to visit the State next month for a ‘random sampling ground truthing’ of the redefined ESAs. The team, which held a preliminary meeting with State officials here in June, was expected to carry out field verification in at least 25 per cent of the 123 villages.

 

Read more »

Panel to work out plans to meet Ghats report fallout

Girish Menon
Thiruvananthapuram,  
The Hindu, March 4, 2014 

The Congress-Government Coordination Committee that will meet here on Tuesday is expected to work out a strategy to tackle the possible fallout of the K. Kasturirangan report on the conservation of Western Ghats that has identified 123 villages in the State as ecologically sensitive areas (ESAs).

Senior party leaders are expecting some sort of action from the Union government, at least to the extent of accepting the Oommen V. Oommen panel report that had recommended exemption from the ESA provisions for an area over 3,000 sq miles, including populated areas and rubber plantations. Congress leaders said they would be happy if the Union government were to issue orders to achieve this objective, as it would give the party much-wanted advantage in the campaign for the Lok Sabha polls.

If the Centre does issue the promised course correction, the Congress leadership will have to work its way out of the problems created by the report, and recapture its space among the settler segments of the electorate. If the amendments do not come through, then the leadership will find itself in a political bind that might not be easy to untie.

Communal imbalance

The Congress leadership spent a major part of the past three years trying to correct the communal imbalance in a coalition that had a pre-dominant minority tilt. The correction was achieved with the induction of Ramesh Chennithala as Home Minister and V.M. Sudheeran as the Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee president.

It is an irony that the party should find itself at odds with the settler community and the Catholic Church, both of whom have been steadfast supporters of the Congress and the United Democratic Front, that too at a time when the coalition leaders believed that they were on a good political wicket.

Party leaders here are inclined to blame the Centre for its slow reaction to the political impact of the Kasturirangan report. “The Chief Minister had, in his memorandum to the Prime Minister in the last week of January, highlighted the urgency of accepting Kerala’s demand for changes. The response of the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests appears to be ambiguous,” a senior Congress leader said. The Congress leaders might find it difficult to keep down criticism against Union Minister for Environment and Forests M. Veerappa Moily’s actions, sources said.

Party sources said a specific agenda had not been fixed for the party-Government Coordination Committee meeting. The committee’s meeting on January 17 had kept aside several issues for in-depth discussions at a later date. These included the Congress’s stand on the proposed Aranmula airport and code of conduct for ministers. The party leadership would be under pressure for time to discuss these matters.

 

Read more »