THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: More than three years after the High Court directed the state to recover encroached forest land, the Forest Department has managed to take into possession just 280 acres, or just about 1.5 per cent of the total encroached forest land of 19,277 acres. Since the HC had wanted the recovery to be completed by September 2016, the Forest Department had filed a petition in the Supreme Court seeking more time for completing the eviction proceedings.
More time was sought not to get the job done, but to create a smokescreen.
“No government in power has shown the political will to evict encroachers. Even attem-pts to take action against recent encroachments have met with aggressive opposition, and the police and the district administration have turned their back when help was sought,” a top Forest Department official said. It is not as if the encroachers are an invisible lot. A survey had been conducted and the list of all encroachers, and the rough extent of their encroachment, has been submitted to the concerned district collectors.
But such an identification process will remain futile till the Forest Department clearly demarcates encroachments before January 1, 1977. “Since encroachments prior to 1977 have not been defined it is open for those who had encroached after 1977 to claim that they too had encroached before 1977,” the Forest Department source said. Fact is, in northern parts of the state, title deeds have still not been distributed to families who had encroached before 1977.
The Kerala Land Assignment (Regularisation of Occupations of Forest Lands Prior to January 1, 1997) Special Rules was issued in 1993. Though the joint verification of lands encroached before 1977 was completed in 1992, a year before the Rules were issued, boundary markers were not planted. As a consequence, those in the encroacher list have been aggressively asking for a second joint verification.
The second joint verification is at present on at Wayanad, Kozhikode, Mannarkad and Nilambur. Significantly, the largest encroachments are in Mannarkad (6,672.54 acres), Wayanad (4,297.14) and Nilambur divisions (1,691). Another curious fact is, encroachers have not taken the government to court for including them in list of encroachers. “It is a clear sign that they are confident that they will not be evicted,” the official said.
