Punjab: Irrigation Dept asked to give land for afforestation

Rajmeet Singh

Chandigarh, July 25

Around eight years after 24,777 trees were illegally felled for widening the 800-km-long Bist-Doab canal, the Forest Department has asked the Irrigation Department to provide 60 hectares of land to carry out compensatory afforestation. The trees were cut in 2016 during the SAD-BJP regime.

The Rs 270-crore project to widen the canal had sparked a row after foresters and environmentalists cried foul over tree felling in an area classified as “protected forest”. The canal and its distributaries that meander through Nawanshahr and Jalandhar districts carry the Sutlej water from the Ropar headworks.

Taking up the matter, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) had termed the cutting of trees as illegal as permission under the Forest Conservation Act (FCA), 1980, had not been sought. The NGT had asked the state to carry out compensatory afforestation on an equivalent area of non-forest land, besides paying for its maintenance for five years.

Sources said the Irrigation Department had been asked to provide nearly Rs 2 crore for carrying out plantation under the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA).

Earlier, the Forest Department was questioned over spending lakhs of rupees from the CAMPA funds to defend a deforestation case before the NGT. The department spent around Rs 86 lakh on the fee of senior advocates.