Prakash Kamat
Panaji, November 2-Hundreds of Goan citizens occupied the Chandor rail tracks in South Goa last night to protest against unethical corporates, government and policies on coal.
Even as a steadily growing number of citizens' groups and citizen-led movements are opposing the need for a destruc6tive coal-powered transmission line project fragmenting the Western Ghats, on 28th of October, a Writ Petition against Goa Tamnar was filed in the High Court by Goa Foundation,Green NGO always spearheading the cause of environment, in view of illegal permissions granted for the clear felling of over 2000 trees and the permissions for the construction of the substation granted in the absence of a conversion sanad.
A conversion sanad is a document issued by the Office of the Collectorate certifying that Non-Agricultural usage has been permitted on a plot of land. Without this, no permissions for any development can be granted. In contrast to their public claims about having all necessary permissions, Tamnar admitted in Court that they don’t have Conversion Sanad for the substation. Tamnar has also made a statement to the Court that they are not carrying out any work on the substation. The next hearing will take place on December 1.
The 400 KV Goa-Tamnar transmission line project (a SPV of Sterlite Power) is a power project that threatens Goa’s largest protected forest area ( Mollem National Park and Bhagwan Mahavir Wildlife Sanctuary) and private land-holdings of non-forest areas in Goa. The project consists of four components within Goa: three transmission lines and one sub-station in Sangod Village, North Goa.
The User Agency has applied for as many as four forest diversion proposals, in doing so, bifurcating four components of a singular project, with a fifth forest diversion proposal applied for in Karnataka. The project seeks to divert a total of 323.596 ha of forest land, through the State of Goa (146.505 ha) and State of Karnataka (177.091 ha). Submission of such piecemeal forest clearances for implementing 3 projects violates the Forest (Conservation) Rules and is an attempt to dilute the cumulative impact of the three projects on forests of Goa and Western Ghats.
It is to be noted that the Supreme Court of India in 2015 ordered that "No Objection Certificate(s)" will not be issued in Goa for the conversion of any land of over 1 hectare that has natural vegetation with tree canopy density in excess of 0.1. Since the area of land cleared for the substation in Sangod is 11.8 hectares and the canopy density of the area is 0.7, this is a clear violation of said Order. Furthermore, several forest officers from Karnataka have gone on record relaying their concerns related to the depletion of forest cover, thus highlighting the broader regional concerns of this power project. A letter written on 18th June, 2020, by 150 scientists highlights several issues regarding the lack of clarity on the manner in which the Environment Impact Assessments(EIAs) were prepared, and the difficulty in finding these EIAs in the public domain.
Meanwhile, the Goa government appears to be in a great hurry to collaborate with Sterlite Power (a subsidiary of Vedanta), a business that will be selling electricity to the State of Goa, while using the land in the protected area to pass its transmission line through. In normal circumstances Sterlite would have to spend a significant amount of money buying the land on which it is to set up its business activities but in this case all it needs is four signatures from the State government to take over the land for free.
Why a company is being allowed to have access to Goa's natural heritage for free has been a question that thousands of citizens across Goa have addressed to their government over the past several months. Among the concerns regarding the utter lack of due process, questions have been raised about why police protection was given to Sterlite Power as early as February, 2019 before this project was even approved. This fact is all the more unsettling when Sterlite’s past record at their Tuticorin plant is brought into consideration, where the police opened fire and killed 13 people from the fishing community who were opposing a copper plant.
After two years of not producing this document, on 20th October, Mr. Nilesh Cabral, Goa Power Minister (who also holds the office of Environment Minister) issued a White Paper on Electric Load Demand over the Last 10 years in which he has made blatantly false statements which don’t match up with figures stated in the 19th EPS documents, which clearly show that in the Electricity Demand Projections for Goa for the year 2021 -2022, industrial and commercial consumers will use 3122 MU (Million Units) of power as compared to just 1280 MU (Million Units) by domestic b. The White Paper, like the EIA and Assessment Studies, has not been uploaded into the public domain for scrutiny or clarification. On the same day, citizens wrote to him,demanding that the paper be made available to the public.
Amidst several weak and unclear justifications for this project, it is also not clear that citizens who live around the project areas have been taken on board, especially since these projects were passed at the beginning of the lockdown. Astonishingly, despite a majority of panch members in Mollem asking for a Gram Sabha on 4th October, 2020, the licence was issued without a Gram Sabha on the 5th October. The Panchayat Secretary has not signed the license along with the Sarpanch.
Tree felling permission in private land bought for the construction of the substation by Goa Tamnar is supposedly granted under section 31 of the Goa Tree Preservation Act, 1984, which gives them an exemption from following the provision of the Act as it is done in public interest. A project done in public interest should ideally not prompt the government to restrict citizens coming forward with questions, using section 144 of Criminal Procedure Code. For example, on 8th of October, Mollem residents were detained without explanation when they went to submit a memorandum at the Goa Chief Minister's house.
In what can now be identified as a familiar pattern, because these documents were not uploaded in the public domain, people lost their right to appeal against the tree felling permission within 30 days from the grant of such permission. This amounts to cheating the public as this infringes the "RIGHT TO KNOW" which is also our fundamental right under the Constitution. Additionally, the forest clearance proposals with all relevant information were on MOEF’s web portal PARIVESH but have now “mysteriously disappearedsays a press release issued on Monday on behalf of the protestors.(eom)
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