: The Odisha forest department has been asked to identify 10,000 hectare of degraded forestland for creating land bank for compensatory afforestation against forest diversions for railway, national highway and coal mine projects.
The decision to earmark 10,000 ha of land was taken in the meeting of Project Monitoring Group of the Cabinet Committee which took stock of the ongoing railway, national highway, coal mine, steel and power generation projects in Odisha here on Monday.
Around 40 projects were reviewed and factors that held projects back were discussed.
The PMG of Cabinet Committee discussed land acquisition, taking possession of the acquired land by the project developers, alignment of roads, disbursement of compensation, laying of underground pipe line, felling of trees and conducting social impact assessment studies.
Implementation of major projects such as Jharsuguda-Barpalli-Sardega Railway line, Jharsuguda-Rengali doubling, Talcher-Bimlagarh new railway line, Angul-Sukhinda new line project, Birmitrapur Barkote Highway, Kulda open cast project (OCP), Siarmal OCP, Balaram OCP, Lakhanpur OCP, Paradip-Haldia-Barauni Pipeline, Paradip-Durgapur LPG Pipeline and Paradip-Raipur-Ranchi Pipeline figured in the discussion.
