Three weeks before the Central Ministry of Environment Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) gave its contentious stage 1 (in-principle) forest clearance to the mega infrastructure project in Great Nicobar Island, the chief minister of Haryana, Manohar Lal Khattar, already knew about it.
Speaking at a press conference on October 6, 2022, he explained in detail his government’s plan for setting up a “jungle safari park” over 10,000 acres of land spread over the Gurugram and Nuh districts. Khattar first announced the project, billed as the world’s largest such safari park, on his Twitter handle on September 29 while on a visit to the Jungle Safari in Sharjah
Visit of Sharjah Safari Park (Dubai). pic.twitter.com/D9Qpl1GJ02
Advertisement— Manohar Lal (@mlkhattar) September 29, 2022
Accompanying him on the trip was Rajya Sabha MP and Union environment minister Bhupender Yadav. The Haryana state government also issued a detailed press release on the jungle safari on September 29 that was reported widely by the media.
While there are no details of the financial aspects of the project yet, Khattar pointed to the possible source of the money in the press conference: “As you might be aware,” he said in his Hindi address to the press “a big area of Andaman and Nicobar will be deforested and the Centre has told Haryana that we will create forests in your area with the compensatory allowance for the deforested area. That is the reason why this big safari project will be possible and this is what the compensatory amount will be used for.”
The deforestation the CM was referring to is the cutting down of nearly a million trees in Great Nicobar Island as part of the NITI Aayog piloted Rs 72,000 crore project that involves the construction of a transshipment terminal, an airport, a power plant and a greenfield township and tourism set up. Strikingly, however, the decision to grant this permission had not been made by the Union government at the time Khattar made this announcement. This came only three weeks later, on October 27, via a letter signed by MoEFCC’s assistant inspector general of forests, Suneet Bhardwaj.
“How did the Haryana CM already know of this on October 6 when the forest clearance and compensation had not even been announced till then?” asks a senior researcher on grounds of anonymity. “How and why was he privy to this information?”
Compensatory afforestation
Importantly, Haryana is not even mentioned as the site of compensatory afforestation in the final environment assessment report approved by the MoEFCC for the Great Nicobar project; it is the state of Madhya Pradesh. It is still not clear how and why the change was made to Haryana but Khattar’s press conference provides some indication of what may have happened.
There have been many questions about the ecological wisdom of compensating tropical evergreen forests with tree plantations in a semi-arid zone more than 2,000 km away. A group of environmentalists of the Aravalli Bachao Citizen’s Movement wrote on January 19 to the MoEFCC and the Haryana government asking, in fact, for the cancellation of the safari park project. They note in their representation that the intention behind the safari park was not conservation but revenue generation for the state.
Ecological economist Vijay Kolinjivadi, who is currently with the Institute of Development Policy at the University of Antwerp agrees. “This is not compensatory afforestation but the development of two separate commercial and tourism projects. How can thousands of years of ecosystem functioning and human co-habitation in the forests of Great Nicobar be substituted or made equivalent,” he asks, “to a safari park in the Aravallis?”
Process violations?
There have been concerns about the violations of process as well, the most striking being the absence of any record of how the MoEFCCs’ forest advisory committee (FAC) recommended the forest clearance that Khattar was seeking to capitalise upon. The Forest Conservation Act mandates that proposals for forest clearance must be examined by the FAC, but this does not seem to have happened in this case. More than 20 meetings of the FAC were held in the two-year period between October 2020 – when forest clearance was sought for the Great Nicobar project – and October 2022, when Stage 1 clearance was granted by the committee. Neither the agenda nor the minutes of any of these meetings even mention the project, suggesting that the FAC did not discuss the Nicobar project at all.
Yet, the clearance letter of October 27 mentions that “the proposal has been examined by the Forest Advisory committee” and also makes it explicit that the clearance is based on its “recommendations”. Emails sent in October and November last year and again in January 2023 to Bhardwaj in the MoEFCC, Vivek Saxena, the forest officer in-charge of compensatory afforestation in Haryana, and members of the FAC requesting clarifications received no response except in one case. A member of the FAC responded ambiguously, suggesting that the chairman of the FAC should be approached to get the desired information. “The FAC is only a recommending body,” he said, “the final decision/ approval lies with Hon’ble Minister MoEFCC.”
A follow-up communication requesting details of the recommendations of the FAC as mentioned in the clearance letter of October 27 received no response.
Pankaj Sekhsaria has been researching issues of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands for over two decades. His most recent book, Waiting for Turtles, is an illustrated storybook for children on turtle nesting in the Andamans. He is author/editor of five books on the islands.
