Kerala: 14,000 hectares of Ecologically Fragile Land not surveyed

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Even two decades after the implementation of the Kerala Forest (Vesting and Management of Ecologically Fragile Lands) Act, 2003, the Forest Department has preferred to leave the status of 14,000-odd hectares of land taken over as EFL in vague territory. The LDF government continues to toe the line of the former UDF ministry, which had virtually dumped the EFL Act.  The Forest Department, more than a year after the LDF came to power, has not issued any orders to conduct the survey of these notified areas, nor has it done anything to expedite the notification of 163 hectares of land that is pending with the EFL custodian.

Worse, no directions have been issued to identify the total extent of EFL in the state. These 14,000-odd hectares of land can be notified in the gazette as EFL only after a survey is done, and the boundaries clearly marked. These lands, as a result, exist now not as EFL but as “proposed EFL”. The suspicion about the EFL Act had risen after the advent of ESAs. Fact is, the motive behind the EFL Act was not to identify new sensitive areas like what the Gadgil or Kasturirangan committees did, but to reclaim lands that were already taken over under the Forest vesting and Assig-nment Act, 1961, and then lost to encroachment.

During the earlier UDF tenure, Congress MLAs like V.D. Satheesan had charged that any attempts to scuttle the EFL Act would help encroachers. Officially, shortage of surveyors is cited as the reason for non-demarcation.  The divisional forest officers have not made any request to the Survey Department for additional staff in the first place. As per the EFL Act, any forest land held by a private individual and lying contiguous to, or encircled by, a Reserved Forest or a vested forest which is predominantly supporting natural vegetation is termed as Ecologically Fragile Land. “The hazy nature of areas notified as EFL lends itself easily to further encroachments,” a former Forest Department official said.

There is another reason why even the Forest Department is not keen on acting on the basis of the EFL Act. “It is an open-ended Act. The Act, strangely, had not specified any time frame for completing this task,” said Tony Thomas of One Earth One Life.  “As a consequence, the department, too, had not prepared any action plan for executing this task in a concerted manner,” he added. And the result: the Department had failed to identify all the ecologically fragile lands in the State.