The Odisha government has been instructed by the Union Environment Ministry to deal with the officials who approved the building of an Ekalavya Model Residential School (EMRS) in the Keonjhar district, without the necessary forest clearance. The school was constructed on 1.80 hectares of forest cover without prior permission from the Centre as stipulated by the Forest Conservation Act, 1980.
The case was reviewed at the meeting of the Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) on September 26, where the proposal of ex-post facto approval was discussed. The committee observed that the EMRS building had been built over a land that had 2.803 hectares of forest land and 0.456 hectares of non-forest land of Erendei village, the tehsil of Keonjhar district. The FAC pointed out that such development without prior permission is an outright infringement of the Van Adhiniyam as well as the Forest Conservation Act.
The district administration acknowledged the lapse and said that the construction was carried on in good faith according to land records, which existed at the time, of the land being non-forest. Subsequent checks turned out that the land had always been documented as being part of Jungle Kissam. The Tahasildar immediately brought the issue to the attention of the district welfare officer and the collector, and a proposal was submitted to regularise the unintentional violation by means of a forest diversion proposal.
The FAC accepted that the construction was done without any mala fide intent, as the available records showed, according to the Divisional Forest Officer (DFO), Keonjhar, and the Deputy Inspector General of Forests (DIGF), IRO Bhubaneswar.
Nevertheless, the committee was very strict on the oversight of the procedure and advised the Odisha government to look into the issue.
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