MOHALI: Former Punjab Minister,Jagmohan Singh Kang, here Saturday, ridiculed the contention of the Punjab Forest Department  that lands in area under Punjab Land and Peripheri Act(PLPA) were forest area. He wondered  that when neighbouring state Haryana had already notified that PLPA lands and no  Forest Conservation Act 1980 was applicable on them, there was no reason why Punjab was bent upon treating these as forest areas.

He alleged that he had come to know from reliable sources that  Forest department didn't want to delist PLPA lands as they intended to swindle huge funds  meant for afforestation of kandi areas of Ropar, Nawanshahar, Gurdaspur & Hoshiarpur districts under the Japan Bank of International cooperation scheme and some other schemes of Centre and State.
 
Kang ,Ex- MLA of  Morinda Vidhan Sabha Constituency, urged the Forest Department that without making  it a prestige issue, it should scrap PLPA on merit in public interest. "Of course, forests  are must to stop pollution and to save the environment, but all this at the cost of causing hardship and harassment to the poor farmers of the kandi area is not plausible. There is  mushroom growth of population  including market, shops, roads, schools and colonies in Nada, Naya Gaon and Karoran Villages adjoining Chandigarh falling in Nagar Panchayat Naya Gaon. All this development had not taken place over night but slowly over a span of more than 30 years, that  too under the nose of forest department", he said.

Kang said that PLPA lands as per revenue records were either barani, gairmumkin pahar, or lands having subsistence agriculture. There were no stock forest maps available which would say so much is forest and so much is under cultivation. Merely if some trees exist along with agriculture, the area can not be classified as forests. Moreover, as per Punjab Forest  Manual Vol. III, the stock maps of these forests have to be there to term them as forests. In the absence of that each and every PLPA land can not be termed as forests. The lands to start with were essentially agriculture lands but prone to soil erosion, he added.
 
Kang pointed out that the forest department had categorically admitted through affidavits and  through correspondence with the Government of India that these areas were erroneously declared as forests. Affidavit submitted by Mr. J.S. Kesar , the  then Secretary forest, Government of Punjab in October 1999 to the apex court   which gives reference of affidavits submitted by Karl Reddy on 30.10.1996, Ravneet Kaur on 21.2.1997 and Dharamvir on 12.9.1998, earlier Forest Secretaries, makes it abundantly clear that these lands were erroneously depicted  as forests.
 
Kang  said that  following instructions of the Supreme Court to the Ministry of Environment  and Forests ,  keeping in view the representation of the forest department,  GOI had delisted 707 hectare  area of Karoran and Nada villages  from the list of forests. However, no compensatory afforestation was done as envisaged under Forest Conservation Rules 2003 framed under Forest Conservation Act 1980. This itself showed  that Govt. of India never ever recognized them as forests . Had they been forests, then Govt. of India would not  have taken it off the list of forests without resorting to Forest Conservation Rules 2003,  he averred.   He  stressed that  very fact that delisting of forests of Karoran and Nada  have been done without taking recourse to compensatory afforestation or  depositing of New Present Value clearly establishes that these areas were not forests.