Wednesday, Oct 01, 2003
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Kerala-Thiruvananthapuram
By P. Venugopal
The road project through the 14 sq. km. shola forest, considered the biggest shola vegetation in peninsular India, has been in progress for quite some time despite the efforts of the Forest Department to prevent it and affidavits filed in courts by environment groups. The Empowered Committee, which held a sitting here yesterday, took up the matter with the Government following a complaint filed by the State unit of the Worldwide Fund for Nature. The chairman of the committee, P. V. Jayakrishnan, reportedly told the secretary, Public Works Department, to halt the work immediately or face prosecution. The committee also issued a letter directing the Government to stop the work. The Government had been, in fact, implementing this project with assistance from the National Bank for Agricultural and Rural Development (NABARD) under its Rural Infrastructure Development Fund scheme. The Mannavan shola was notified as a reserved forest through an order of the Government of the erstwhile Travancore State on October 22, 1901. Such a forest tract automatically comes under the purview of the 1980 Forest Conservation Act. Any activity in this area, including the construction of a road, could be undertaken only after obtaining prior permission of the Central Government. The State Government did not even put up an application to the Centre seeking this permission. Formerly, there used to be a trek path through this shola, connecting the Kanthallur and Kundala villages, where there are many settlers. This trek path was converted into a jeep road four years ago without the requisite clearance from the Union Department of Environment and Forests. The ongoing project envisages converting the jeep road into an eight-metre-wide tarred road, fit for all vehicles. The leading beneficiaries of the project would have been the ganja cultivators and sandal smugglers of the region. The road will help them bypass all forest checkposts to take their booty to the market. It can also lead to the devastation of the rich, high-altitude shola vegetation of the Mannavan Shola by making even the interior areas accessible to the plunderers of forest wealth. Many trees, including tree ferns of gigantic size unique to this shola, have already been axed down for constructing the road. Conservationists say that 12 of the 16 endemic species of birds reported from the Western Ghats are seen in Mannavan Shola. A study by the Kerala Forest Research Institute (KFRI), highlighting the ecological significance of the area, describes it as one of the richest high-altitude shola vegetations in the country. The KFRI, in this study sponsored by the Union Department of Environment and Forests, recommends notifying this "rare montane forest as a shola reserve''. The streams flowing from the Mannavan Shola are the only source of water for the entire rain-shadow region of Anchanad valley in Idukki district.
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