Chandigarh Administration to again ask Punjab, Haryana to declare eco-sensitive zone around Sukhna Lake

Tribune News Service

Dushyant Singh Pundir

Chandigarh, December 28

The UT Administration will again take up the issue of declaring eco-sensitive zone (ESZ) around the Sukhna Wildlife Sanctuary with Punjab and Haryana at the 20th meeting of the Standing Committee of Northern Zonal Council (NZC) to be held in Mohali on January 12.

Several senior officials, including chief secretaries of four states and UTs, will participate in the meeting. The NZC comprises Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Rajasthan, National Capital Territory, Delhi, and the Union Territory of Chandigarh.

Even as the ESZ issue was taken up at a council meeting held in Jaipur under the chairmanship of Union Home Minister Amit Shah on July 9, Punjab and Haryana are still to declare ESZ around the sanctuary in their respective territories.

UT Adviser Dharam Pal said the issue would again be raised at the upcoming meeting. The UT had also written to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to speed up the process to notify the ESZ around the sanctuary for the area that fell in Punjab and Haryana.

Earlier also, the administration had asked the Centre and the Haryana and Punjab governments to declare the ESZ at the earliest. If the declaration of the ESZ was delayed further, more encroachments and illegal constructions could take place and then it would be difficult to remove them, said an official. It was important to notify the ESZ as early as possible to preserve greenery around the sanctuary.

The UT Administration has been pushing for the declaration of the ESZ by Punjab and Haryana after it declared the area of 2 km-2.75 km from the boundary of the sanctuary as a sensitive zone. It had opposed a proposal of the Punjab Government to declare area only 100 m on its side from the boundary of the sanctuary as the ESZ. However, the Haryana Government had recently intended to declare 1 km-1.5 km area in its territory as the ESZ.

On September 17, 2015, the Ministry of Forest and Environment had issued a draft notification for the sanctuary area that fell in Chandigarh, and not for the areas that came under Punjab and Haryana. The UT Administration had urged the ministry to issue a notification for the entire ESZ to protect the sanctuary, 90 per cent area of which fell in Punjab and Haryana. However, on January 25, 2017, the ministry had declared ESZ only for Chandigarh.

The lake had been notified as wetland under the Wetlands (Conservation and Management) Rules, 2017, to preserve its original character. Notifying it as the ESZ is a step further, since this would ensure that no hotel, commercial building, cinema hall, mall or any other construction come up within a radius of 7-8 km of the lake.

An official said the issue of transportation would be discussed during the meeting with the neighbouring states. Thousands of vehicles enter the UT daily from Panchkula and Mohali. Both cities have not made much effort for public transport. There would be discussions on how this issue could be resolved with mutual coordination. There would also be discussions on how to reduce the increasing number of outstation patients at the PGI.

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