The Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) has come down on forest and other government officials for allowing five windmills to encroach upon over 220 acres of forest land, at the cost of over 19,000 trees on the foothills of the Western Ghats without permission.
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On May 16, 2018, just a day after the counting of votes polled in the Assembly elections, the Regional Empowered Committee (REC) took up the matter of five windmills run by Suzlon Energy Ltd. that had deviated from the land allotted to them during construction nearly a decade ago. The windmills cumulatively generate 128.4 MW of electricity and are installed in five State Forests in Hassan district.
On May 15, the Principal Chief Conservator of Forests noted that while the windmills used 19.5 hectares of forest land within their lease area (they had been allotted 130 hectares in 2006), their realignment without approval saw them encroach upon 92.062 hectares (nearly 1 sq. km of forest area) outside it.
Moreover, the realignment came at the cost of the forest itself. A decade ago, the Forest Department approved the felling of 7,315 trees for the windmills. During construction though, 19,389 trees were felled in the State Reserve Forests, according to documents available with
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However, it was only in October 2017 that the State government forwarded a proposal to regularise the additional forest land and transfer the leased land to 32 investors in the projects. In each case, the deviation was said to be because of realignment of roads, electric lines and other issues. Earlier this year, the REC directed the State to bring out a detailed report on the violations.
While the REC did recommend regularisation of the encroachments, it directed the Forest Department to reclaim the unused land immediately and increase the penalty by 20% since the commencement of the violations. “...there is a serious lapse on the part of the State Forest Department by not supervising the implementation of the project...State government should take necessary steps to fix responsibility on the concerned officials, take disciplinary action, and avoid such lapses in future,” the REC has said.
Meanwhile, a Suzlon spokesperson said: “The projects have been developed with all approval from all the requisite authorities, including the Forest Department. Further, a deviation proposal approval, as also permissible under the laid down rules, has been submitted.”
A bigger problem?
According to forest officials, the problem of parties deviating from approval instructions to construct windmills may be far more pervasive. In the mid-2000s, a thrust in this direction from the government saw windmills being set up in large numbers and many companies applied for approval before conducting feasibility surveys. “As these were on the ridges of the hills, they changed road alignments after construction based on what was practical... But the Forest Department should have identified this. We have asked the State government to take action, against the user agency or forest officials, for failure to monitor,” said Jagmohan Sharma, nodal officer of the Forest Rights Act and special invitee of the REC.
Senior forest officials said they would wait for the REC order before initiating action. However, fixing culpability will be difficult as this sort of realignment by windmill companies was a common practice and remained undetected until 2012, when circulars were issued to ensure that fresh applications for windmill construction were allowed only after thorough ground surveys.