HC stays land deals in Gir periphery

Issue involves possession of land by non-Maldharis

Ahmedabad: The Gujarat high court has stayed land deals in the periphery of the lions’ den – the Gir sanctuary – as the issue of possession of land by non-Maldharis in the surrounding forest reserve is to be resolved before the division bench.

Earlier, a single-judge bench held that the land was allotted to Maldharis towards rehabilitation purpose. But since the land was sold to other people, it frustrates the purpose of conservation of forest and hence should be taken back by the forest department as per the Indian Forest and Wildlife Protection Act.

After declaring Gir forest as sanctuary, the government in 1977 began shifting 845 Maldharis from the forest to the outskirts and allotted plots for their rehabilitation. Some 588 families were given land in the periphery of the sanctuary. However, revenue department later allowed them to sell the land to non-Maldharis and 292 plots were sold out.

The forest department said, those Maldharis who sold their land actually went back to the forest. Hence the purpose for allotting the land was defeated. As per the state government’s declaration of the area as reserve forest, nobody except Maldharis should be allowed to stay or carry out non-forest activity on this land, which largely falls under the Mendarda block of Junagadh.

When the forest officials restricted one Anil Chudasama from construction on a land purchased in this area, he approached the authorities and later the high court. While the forest department insisted that such people who have purchased land from the Maldharis should be evicted, the revenue department had another take on it.

Last year, justice MR Shah appointed advocate Amit Panchal as amicus curie, who submitted a report that such land needs to be taken back. Accordingly, justice Shah held that Chudasama had no right to carry out construction or agriculture activity on the plot, though he was the third purchaser of the plot after the Maldhari sold it long ago.

The HC accepted that the land falls under reserved forest category. Moreover, justice Shah also directed the chief conservator of forest to inquire into the cases of 292 plots and decide as per the provisions of the forest act, which means that the land holding would be declared as illegal.

This had also an indication that the decision to allot land to the tribals in 1977 could be declared null and void. When this decision was challenged by Chudasama before a division bench, it ordered to maintain status quo on the land and clarified that the plot would not be sold without prior permission of the court.

Don’t become prey to lions: CJ
Ahmedabad: While ordering a stay on land deals in the reserved forest surrounding the Gir sanctuary, chief justice SJ Mukhopadhaya called for maintaining a balance between development and nature. The forest department has been maintaining that the increased grazing has resulted in decrease of prey for lions in the forest. Moreover, the forest officials have also been insisting that the sale of plots allotted to Maldharis be declared illegal, and non-Maldharis be evicted from the place. However, the petitioner claims that he has been deliberately harassed by forest officials due to other social consideration and his ownership of the plot is legal. To this, the chief justice commented, “Lions’ place has to be protected. You shift from the place before you become prey to lions.

By: TIMES NEWS NETWORK

NDTV-Toyota Eco Awards:Special Jury Award for Late Mr.Amit Jethva

Amit Jethwa: As the president of the Gir Nature Youth Club at khambha, Amit Jethwa had been active in fighting against encroachment of forests and poaching. He was also instrumental in the five year jail term of Bollywood actor Salman Khan for shooting an endangered Chinkara deer, a case that concluded after being pursued by activists for eight years. He campaigned vigorously against corruption among officers of the Indian Forest Service.  In 2007, he drew attention to the mysterious deaths of lions in Gir Forest including three that were shot within a few hundred meters of the Babariya forest guard outpost. The incident ultimately led to the uncovering of a large lion poaching gang. He was fighting a court case against illegal mining in Gir, when he was gunned down by 2 hired killers

Guns out in south Gujarat to kill man-eating leopard , Plz comment

The Wild Cat Has Killed Four Persons In Three Weeks In The Region



Times of india : Yagnesh Mehta

Surat: For the first time an order to shoot a leopard has been issued in South Gujarat’s forest region after the man eater killed an 11-yearold girl in the wee hours of Friday at Vareli Patna village in Mandvi taluka of Surat district. “In the past such orders had been issued in Godhra and Chhota Udepur. However, it is first time that an order to shoot a leopard has been given in South Gujarat,” said Deva Babu Ande, conservator of forest, Surat.

In Godhra, the order to shoot a leopard was issued in 2003 after it killed nine people. Similar incidents forced the authorities to issue an order to shoot the wild cat in Chhota Udepur in 2005. The order to shoot the leopard in South Gujarat comes in the wake of the wild cat killing four persons, including the minor girl, in Mandvi taluka of Surat district in a span of three weeks.

“The leopard has turned a man eater. We are taking help of a tracker, tranquilising experts and two teams which has two shooters to hunt down the leopard,” said Anil Vasava, deputy conservator of forest, Mandvi. The state government has announced a compensation of Rs 1 lakh to the family of the deceased.

Kajal Rathod was sleeping with her mother, Lakhiben, in their house. Her father Ishwar was sleeping outside when at about 5 am a

leopard entered their house and attacked Kajal.

The leopard caught the victim from neck and dragged her outside the house. The victim’s screams woke up her mother who tried to save her daughter from the clutches of the fully grown wild cat but failed.

The victim was dragged to a sugarcane farm near the village around half a kilometre by the leopard. A group of villagers gathered on hearing Kajal’s parents shouts for help. The people followed the animal into the field which escaped on seeing the crowd. However, the leopard had eaten a large part of the victim’s body leaving only legs, one arm and the head.

Those who were recently killed by the leopard are Ravidas Arjun Valvi, 10, of Kamlapor village. He was attacked on November 5. Jasuben Daniya Chaudhary, 70, of Areth village, became the wild cat’s victim on November 13 while Priti Kiran Chaudhary, 21, was killed by it at Nandpor village on November 18. There were two other incidents of attack by the leopard in the area but the victims were fortunate to survive. Attacks on the cattle are a routine affair by the leopards in the rural areas of Surat district.

Meanwhile, a leopard was caught near Bhatkhai village of Mandvi on Saturday. However, forest officials believe it might not be the same man eater which had killed four people in the taluka.

Plz comment

RTI activist’s killer nabbed from Mumbai

Ahmedabad: Mumbai crime branch officials nabbed Sailesh Pandya, the man who had shot RTI and environment activist, Amit Jethava. Pandya was absconding since Jethava’s murder on July 20. He was nabbed on Tuesday on the basis of a tip-off received by Mumbai cops about a gang of criminals operating in the area. The cops have also seized a revolver from Pandya. Police sources say that it is the same weapon used to kill Jethava opposite Gujarat high court.


According to sources, Pandya was hiding in Mumbai and was in touch with other criminals. Sources added that Rajiv Kadam, additional commissioner of police (crime), Mumbai had got information about a criminal and found Pandya during a search. During questioning, he said that he was wanted in Gujarat in connection with a 2010 murder case and two attempt to murder cases of 2008.

When TOI contacted city crime branch officials, they feigned ignorance about the development. However, later, after contacting their counterparts in Mumbai, city police officials confirmed the arrest. According to a senior official, a team will start off for Mumbai early on Wednesday to get custody of him, after Mumbai police completes the formalities.

Jethava was shot dead at point-blank range by Pandya, along with another man, Pachan Shiva. The duo came near Jethava when he was coming out of Satyamev Complex opposite HC on July 20. Officials said that Jethava’s role as an activist had hindered some projects in protected forest areas. This had irked the powerful mining lobby.

In subsequent investigation, four persons were arrested for the murder, including Shiva Solanki, nephew of Junagadh MP Dinu Solanki, Bahadursinh Vadher, a police constable, Pachan Shiva, Vadher’s friend and Sanjay Chauhan, who pointed out Jethava to Pandya.

by: TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Environment Ministry Team Visits India's Largest Nuke Power Plant Site

MADBAN VILLAGE (Ratnagiri): A 14-member team of the ministry of environment and forest (MoEF) finished inspecting the proposed site for India's largest nuclear power plant (10,000 mega watt), which is to come up in this scenic coastal village, in less than two hours on Thursday afternoon.

As declared, the team did not meet the villagers who have been opposing the project for the past five years. However government sources said that there was nothing wrong with the visit which was a site inspection trip of the MoEF expert assessment team. Union minister for environment Jairam Ramesh had promised the villagers that the environment clearance for the project would be given only after all the doubts of the villagers had been answered.

The nuclear plant which is to come up in the form of six reactors of 1,650 mega watt each, manufactured by the French firm AREVA, is slated to come up between a large grassy plateau and the shore.

The MoEF team which came in a luxury bus under police escort, was spotted going to the plateau at 10.30 am. It left the site at 1 pm. Since it takes an hour to reach the shore from the laterite plateau which has no roads, villagers estimated that the expert team would have had less than half an hour for inspection. "We learnt that the expert team was accompanied by officials of the Nuclear Power Corporation of India. In all fairness, they should have met us also," said Pravin Gawankar, president of Janhit Seva Manch Samiti, Madban. "This only strengthens our suspicions that the government is trying to hide something," he added.

"The Indian government is obviously in a hurry to clear this project before the visit of the French president Nicolas Sarkozy in December," said Satyajit Chavan of the Konkan Vinashkari Prakalp Virodhi Samiti, which is also opposing the host of thermal power plants that are coming up in the two coastal districts of Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg.
Only a handful of the villagers have accepted the compensation cheques and the rest are resolutely opposed to the nuclear plant on environmental grounds. One of their objections is that Konkan is in the seismic zone 3 and is prone to earthquakes. On Dussehra, the villagers defied prohibitory orders and lit bonfires of the new compensation package announced by state revenue minister Narayan Rane whose son Nilesh is the MP from Sindhudurg-Ratnagiri.

The police is now using this incident to round up activists of the Samiti before the 'Jail Bharo' agitation of the villagers on Friday. "The police have raked up some old and concocted cases against our activists to prevent us from gathering in large numbers," said Gawankar. The police had come to arrest him too when he was speaking at the rally at the fishing village of Tulsunde on Thursday afternoon. But he got wind of it and escaped by boat.


Source : http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/

Girl mauled by leopard, dies

Rajkot: A 10-year-old girl was dragged away and killed by a leopard at a field in Dhari taluka of Amreli district on Monday night. This is the second such incident in last 15 days when a leopard has killed a child in the region.


According to reports, victim Laxmi Devi Pujak and her family had come to the village to meet her aunt. The incident happened in the night when Laxmi was collecting firewood from the field in Dangawadar village. The leopard pounced on her and dragged her to an adjacent field. Hearing her screams, villagers rushed to Laxmi’s help. But by then, the big cat had escaped, leaving behind her body.

The incident has caused panic in the village, especially as this is the second such death recently. Earlier, an eight-yearold tribal girl was dragged away while she was sleeping at night in an open hutment at a farm and killed by a leopard in Dhari range of the Gir sanctuary. Chandrika Bamaniya, a native of Jambua district in Madhya Pradesh, and her family had moved to Gopalgram village in Dhari taluka of Amreli district for labour work in agriculture. The family was sleeping in a makeshift arrangement in an open agriculture field.

Who will protect the whistleblower?

About a month after activist Amit Jethava was murdered, the Central government came up with a legislative proposal to prevent such tragic killings. The dead man was an environmentalist and died because he campaigned to save Gujarat's Gir lion reserve from the ravages of illegal mining. The Bill introduced in the Lok Sabha on August 26 expanded the definition of whistleblower. It said anyone who makes a "public interest disclosure" is a whistleblower.

It was a great leap forward from where we stood till then. Under the 2004 Cabinet resolution, only a public servant could be a whistleblower. But the expanded definition is the only real positive change in the official attitude towards whistleblowing. In other respects, "the public interest disclosure and protection to persons making the disclosure Bill, 2010", to call it by its real name, is anodyne. The Bill's biggest weakness is that it retains the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) as the designated agency or "competent authority" to deal with complaints filed by whistleblowers. The CVC is also meant to protect whistleblowers. Both provisions are carry-overs from the 2004 Cabinet resolution on whistleblowing.

Both carry over the problems of the past into an era meant that is meant to be more free and fair. The CVC, the apex body for all vigilance cases at the Centre, is embroiled in controversy. Moreover, it is a toothless body and can only ever give advice rather than registering a criminal case or issuing any direction to CBI. The CVC's recommendations are routinely rejected by many government departments. The CBI too pays it little heed. In its current form then, the Whistleblower Bill, will make no difference to the culture of impunity in corruption cases. The CVC can only make recommendations when instances of corruption are brought to light by whistleblowers. What use will that be to anyone, particularly a society that wants to clean up?

But there is an even bigger problem with making the CVC the Bill's designating agency. Of late, there is a question mark over its independence. Telecom secretary P J Thomas's September 7 appointment as its head triggered the row. There were allegations that the government appointed Thomas to the CVC in order to shield telecom minister A Raja in the 2G spectrum scam. Just a month before Thomas arrived in his new job, he signed a document that claimed the spectrum allocation was impervious to investigation by any agency because "revenue considerations play a secondary role" in government policy on telecommunications.

Clearly, the Whistleblower Bill's expectations of the CVC are misplaced when it deems the agency trustworthy enough to recommend "appropriate administrative steps for redressing the loss caused to the government as a result of corrupt practice or misuse of office or misuse of discretion". Given the way Thomas sought to justify revenue losses in the 2G spectrum scam, what recommendation would the CVC he heads make if the public servants named by whistleblowers came up with similar arguments in their own defence?

But there is one area in which the Bill empowers the CVC to issue binding orders – protecting whistleblowers from victimization and/or physical attack. It also gives the CVC the authority to issue interim orders to stop any corrupt practice highlighted by the whistleblower. But these limited powers are likely to prove inadequate as long as the CVC remains no more than an advisory body when it comes to sensitive matters such as whether or not a corruption case is to be registered against a public servant.

Experts, the enlightened and the eminent — a loose coalition of concerned citizens — have been asking that the government call a spade a spade and redress the many problems in the anti-corruption mechanism. The group, which includes the Karnataka Lok Ayukta, Santosh Hegde, said nomenclature was irrelevant. Call it CVC or Lok Pal or anything else, but it should have the necessary authority and resources to register cases based on whistleblower complaints. They have a point. The scale of corruption in India calls for an ambitious rethink. Sadly, this Bill is only a tiny step in the right direction. There is a long way to go.


Read more: Who will protect the whistleblower? - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-toi/special-report/Who-will-protect-the-whistleblower/articleshow/6582535.cms#ixzz103WtsYa4

'RTI activist Amit Jethva is martyr': Law Minister of India

New Delhi: Calling Right To Information (RTI) activists who have been killed mar tyrs,law minister Veerapp a Moily on Monday said an act meant to protect whistleblowers will be tabled in the winter session of Parliament beginning mid-November.

The RTI activists like Amit Jethava and Satish Shetty are martyrs.I salute them, Moily said while inaugurating a two-day conference on RTI organized by the Central Information Commission.

Social activist Satish Shetty,who had blown the whistle on a series of land scams in and around Talegaon,Lonavala and Pimpri-Chinchwad near Pune,was murdered near his residence in January.Amit Jethava was killed near the Gujarat HC in Ahmedabad in July after he raised his voice against illegal mining in the Gir forests area.These RTI activists have contributed a lot to the country, Moily said.