SC: Any unchecked devpt could turn Goa into ‘another Mumbai’

Panaji: Supreme Court said Goa’s ecosystem would be destroyed and the state would become like another Mumbai, while hearing a private forest case and directing that the status quo should be maintained in the matter.

The observation came during the hearing before a division bench of Justice B V Nagarathna and Justice Ujjal Bhuyan. Justice Nagarathna said Goa would become like another Mumbai.


“As of now there is a stay on conversion. Let that order continue. We’ll say that now, pending consideration of this matter, let there be a status quo. Let there be a non-forest activity. See, the entire coastal zone will be destroyed. It’s a fragile area, ecosystem. The entire ecosystem will be destroyed. Goa will become like another Mumbai,” Justice Nagarathna said. She said how Goa would be different then. “Goans are fed up with these New Year programmes.”

During the hearing on private forests in SC, senior advocate Norma Alvares said that the private forest committee demarcated 8.5sqkm as final forests and another large area as provisional. She said that the review committee decided to nullify the entire exercise and redo it. “And in the process, it deleted nearly 90% of the identified and finalised forest survey numbers,” Alvares said. She said they submitted five-part final reports. Goa Foundation challenged the NGT’s Sep 23, 2023, judgment.

“The NGT accepted state govt’s affidavit, which said that we are treating the entire expert committee reports as provisional. There is no order to that effect, merely an affidavit. The NGT said that when state govt makes a statement on affidavit, it is for the petitioners to prove the statement is wrong. We said if there is an order saying that the entire report is not accepted, that’s what the affidavit said: we do not accept those two reports,” Alvares said.

She said the NGT held that it would accept state govt statement made on affidavit, and that the methodology and the reports were accepted by it.

“The methodology is also a challenge. That was our second challenge. The methodology was a very strange one. They took the digital survey number, digitised survey plans of the two expert committee reports, and placed them on the Forest Survey of India’s green cover maps. Now, the green cover maps are based on satellite imagery,” Alvares said.

She said that anything in the expert committee reports which did not align with the FSI maps, they deleted at the start without looking at it. In that process, a large number of finalised survey numbers were deleted.

Alvares said when they brought to SC’s attention that these final survey numbers were deleted, which meant that development could occur on them, SC on March 3, last year, passed an interim order saying no conversion sanads would be issued for any of the final survey numbers.

Alvares said if the survey numbers are identified as private forests, then they can only be used for forests, and if they are no longer private forests, they can be used for other purposes. Alvares said that 18 parties were given conversion sanads and 19 parties’ conversion sanads are pending.


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