The Assam government has notified a wildlife habitat near the Kaziranga National Park as a reserved forest 20 years after it was proposed and eight years after a refinery had used a part of it to build a wall that blocked an elephant migration route.
The notification declaring Deopahar in eastern Assam’s Golaghat district as a reserved forest was issued on January 19, but the official announcement was made on Saturday. The notification was under Section 17 of the Assam Forest Regulation, 1891.
“Though it has taken a prolonged legal battle and the lives of a few elephants, the notification is a very positive development. This is a victory for the wildlife of this vast and vulnerable forest area linked with the Kaziranga and Karbi Anglong landscape,” environment activist Rohit Choudhury told The Hindu .
On the wall
Mr. Choudhury had taken the Numaligarh Refinery Limited (NRL) to court for building a 2.2 km wall around its residential complex, thereby blocking a major elephant corridor. A few elephants had died in trying to smash through the wall in their path.
Deopahar, covering 133.45 hectares, was in August 1999 notified as a Proposed Reserved Forest in The Assam Gazette. This was months after former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had dedicated NRL, set up nearby, to the nation.
The refinery, which went into production in 2000, built the wall around its township in 2011.
In August 2015, Mr. Choudhury filed a petition about the wall in the National Green Tribunal (NGT), which took a year to order the demolition of the wall. In March 2018, NRL demolished a 289-metre stretch of the wall and filed a review petition stating that the entire wall need not be demolished as it was not a part of Deopahar Reserved Forest.
The NGT rejected the petition in August 2018. The matter was taken up in the Supreme Court, which on January 18 ordered NRL to demolish whatever was left of the wall.
Refinery officials claimed the wall has been demolished, but wildlife activists said it was still standing. “We will wait for the period the Supreme Court has set for removing the wall before taking our next step,” Mr. Choudhury said.
