Madras High Court upholds 17,000 acre rainforest declaration

Chennai: After 48 years of litigation, it’s a major relief to river Moyar, (the lifeline for villages and reserve forests in Nilgiris and Sathyamnagalam) the Madras high court has upheld the declaration of rainforests to an extent of 17,000 acres, which were converted into private estate areas during the colonial era.

“The factual matrix of the case is about Gudalur, which is located in the cradle of the confluence of the Western Ghats and the Eastern Ghats, the epi-centre of these litigations”, said justice P. N. Prakash in his order. It requires no reiteration that the Western Ghats, which is said to have had its origin in Madagascar millions of years before, is a home to thousands of species and is a declared Unesco heritage site. To usher in land reforms, the state of Tamil Nadu passed the Gudalur Janmam Estates (Abolition and Conversion into Ryotwari) Act, 1969 (for brevity “the Act”) for the acquisition of the rights of Janmies in the Janmam estates in the Gudalur and Pandalur taluks and for the introduction of ryotwari settlement in such estates.

During the British rule, the original Janmies had sold, leased out or tenanted some pockets of the vast estate to various tea companies for plantation purpose and those companies are claiming rights either as Janmies or leaseholders or tenants, the order read

The notification clearly states that the government had declared 80,087.74 acres as Janmam lands, out of which, a settlement has been finalised in respect of 28,087.03 acres and the balance extent of 52,000.71 acres was found to be forest land, out of which, 17,014.43 acres of land have been declared as forest land. Thus, it is limpid that the impugned notification is a composite one and not a stand alone order merely declaring certain areas as forest areas.

Therefore, the question once again hearing all the stakeholders does not arise in the facts and circumstances of the cases at hand. Hence, this court rejects the submission of the learned counsel for the petitioners qua pre-decisional hearing by the settlement officer. Section 53 of the Act, the judge said in his detailed order also pointing out the facts put forth by government pleader M. Santhanaraman that about 300 cases still under consideration on the file with the tribunal (district judge, Ootacamund) and that the encroachers were taking advantage of the pendency of the litigations usurping the forest lands, as a result increasing the man-animal conflicts.

The order also discussed that during 2016 as many as 12 people were killed by elephants, 2 mauled by tiger forcing the authorities to gun down the man-eater.
 If any person is aggrieved by the order of the settlement officer declaring his land as forest land, he is entitled to file an appeal to the director and further revision to the government, the order added.