Meghalaya limestone quarries closed

French multinational Lafarge's limestone quarries in Meghalaya, which supply raw material to its cement plant across the border in Bangladesh have been shut down by the government. This comes nearly a year after an official of the Union Ministry of Environment and forests (moef) found that the mining lease area was forestland. The official had also found that environmental consultants and a local

HP snubbed

the Union ministry of environment and forests (mo ef) has taken strong exception to Himachal Pradesh's (hp) decision to denotify a part of its forestland. Under a notification issued in 1952, hp declared all wasteland and tracts on which the state government had proprietary rights as protected areas. However, in 1998, it introduced another notification excluding certain categories of wasteland from forest areas.

Promised land

kerala chief minister A K Antony has just had a good public relations week. He met Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in New Delhi, smiled at the cameras and announced that the Union government had given positive signals about releasing about 12,000 hectares of vested forestland in Wayanad district for distribution among the state's landless tribals.

High court overruled

The Supreme Court has stayed a decision of the Himachal Pradesh High Court permitting a family to cut hundreds of deodar and kail trees on their private forest land. A bench comprising Justice Y K Sabharwal and Justice H K Sema granted the stay in response to the Himachal government's appeal against the high court order.

What happened in Wayanad

It is not the first time that tribals of the Wayanad district in Kerala have rebelled against the state. In fact, the recent incident at the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary in northern Kerala in February 2003 is the third of its kind.

Land is not less

after 48 days of struggle by the Adivasi-Dalit Samara Samithi, the Kerala government agreed to assign around two hectares of land in the estate areas of Sugandhagiri and Pookot to each tribal family on October 16, 2001. In other areas, 0.4-2 hectares of land was to be given, depending on availability.

DISLODGED

The state forest department of Kerala has been ordered by the High Court not to carry on with its proposal for constructing a forest lodge in Parambikulam Wildlife Sanctuary. Apparently, the proposal had no prior sanction of the central government as required under the Forest Conservation Act, 1980. The court rejected the department's argument that no portion of the forest would be cleared for constructing the lodge. According to the court, felling of even one tree amounted to the clearing of forest.

Digging graves

THE Karnataka government seems to have turned a blind eye to the Forest Conservation Act, 1980, while authorising district forest officers to grant leases for quarrying in forest lands across the state. Until recently, the mines and geology department had the sole controlling authority for issuing quarrying licence in the state. Recently, the department had taken severe steps to restrict illegal granite quarrying all over the state. Apparently, the government bowed to pressures from the powerful granite mining lobby. The state government's decision

Conservation's language

Language errors can definitely pose problems, as villagers of 5 districts in the Vidharbha region of Maharashtra will testify. The misinterpretation of 2 Marathi words Zudpi Jungle in the records of the revenue and forest departments of the Maharashtra government -- resulting in their incongruous use in the amended Forest Conservation Act, 1980 -- has put the livelihood of scores of villagers at stake.

Whose forest is it, anyway?

IN THE face of mounting public criticism of the Union ministry of environment and forests' draft Forest Bill, environment minister Kamal Nath's quick sidestep to dismiss the document as a "non-paper" is nothing if not adroit strategy. Only this move could have saved his "green" ministry the embarrassment of getting caught in the act of clandestinely pushing through a draft with Draconian measures against forest users.