Goa CM urges Centre to drop 40 villages from list of eco-sensitive areas

The Goa government has urged the Centre to drop 40 villages from being categorised as Ecologically Sensitive Areas (ESAs) since they do not meet the criteria set out by the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, chief minister Pramod Sawant informed on Wednesday.

Addressing reporters, the chief minister said that 40 villages need to be dropped from the 99 villages that have been notified by the Union ministry, provisionally identifying them as ESAs, which would mean a ban on red category industries being set up in these villages.

“I have been following up on the issue since 2019. They had earlier proposed that 99 villages should be categorised as ESAs. They had three criteria – the village has to be contiguous with the Western Ghats, should be at a certain elevation above sea level and the presence of diverse species of plants and animals. After understanding the issue, (I believe) 40 villages can be dropped...and that they should be dropped. I had sent a proposal to environment minister Bhupendra Yadav to have them dropped,” Sawant said.

“If they want, they can add another 10 villages, but these 40 villages do not meet the criteria,” Sawant said.

“At the end of the day, it is important that we protect the environment and especially the Western Ghats. It is not like if a village is notified as an ESA, farming and building of houses will be disallowed. They have a list of what is allowed and what is not, and barring red category industries and commercial mining, most activities are allowed,” Sawant said.

The CM’s comments have come at a time when an expert team from the Ministry of Environment and Forests is visiting the state and interacting with villagers from the demarcated villages to understand the issues concerning the notification.

In 2022, the Environment Ministry had reissued its earlier draft notification concerning ecologically sensitive areas in the Western Ghats and listed 99 villages spread across 1,461 sq km to be notified as ESAs. The draft notification was based on the recommendations of the Dr K Kasturirangan report.

The Centre had set up the Western Ghats ecology expert panel headed by Dr Madhav Gadgil after acknowledging that the region is a global biodiversity hotspot and supports a population of approximately 50 million people that needed to be conserved.

In his report submitted in 2011, he recommended that large swathes of areas falling within the Western Ghats should be marked as ecologically sensitive areas and excluded from damaging activities. The Gadgil panel divided Western Ghats into ESZ I, II and III, each requiring different levels of protection from human activity.

However, owing to opposition from states, the MoEF set up another committee called the High-Level Working Group headed by former ISRO chief Dr K Kasturirangan, who further reduced the area to be notified as ESAs. However, this report too was rejected by many states.

Environmentalist Claude Alvares of the Goa Foundation said that the controversy over the ESA notification was needless.

“The draft notification explicitly allows people to stay and live in ESAs, repair and extend their houses, and so on. It encourages all forms of agriculture and small industries,” he said.

“If all Goan villages knew the exact contents of the draft notification, they would all want to be part of the ESA. This is because the notification bans red category polluting industries, cement and thermal power plants, mining, real estate projects – all activities that villages in Goa have been opposing for several years,” Alvares said.