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The recent felling of trees in Hyderabad’s Kancha Gachibowli forest area was a “disturbing incident”, a group of retired civil servants and diplomats said on Saturday.
“Our fervent appeal to all governments is to ensure that our forests and biodiversity across the country are protected and not diverted in the name of development,” the Constitutional Conduct Group said in a statement.
The matter pertains to the 400-acre land in the Kancha Gachibowli forest area, which is home to several species of flora and fauna. The Congress government in Telangana had proposed to auction the land for the development of IT parks. However, several groups had protested the decision.
Earlier this month, bulldozers began clearing trees and other vegetation in a 100-acre area near the University of Hyderabad campus. Clashes broke out between the university students and the police during the protests against the felling of trees.
On April 3, the Supreme Court took suo motu cognisance of the matter and ordered a stop to all the tree-felling activities in the area.
It had directed the state’s chief secretary to file an affidavit explaining the “compelling urgency to undertake the developmental activities including the removal of trees from the alleged forest area”.
The state government was also told to clarify if environmental impact assessment certification and other necessary permissions for the development activities had been sought from the forest department. The court asked for information about what the state planned to do with the felled trees.
On Wednesday, the court directed the state government to develop a plan to restore the 100 acres of land.
The group of former bureaucrats said on Saturday that while the Congress had in its 2024 Lok Sabha elections manifesto pledged to uphold sustainable development and environmental protection, the incident at Kancha Gachibowli sharply contradicted the party’s commitments.
“The state government has been vehemently asserting that the land concerned is not forest land,” the group said. “However, there is considerable evidence that refutes this claim.”
Some of the contra-indications that they highlighted include a 1996 Supreme Court ruling in the Godavarman case, where all states, including the undivided Andhra Pradesh at the time, were instructed to identify forests based on the dictionary definition, regardless of the ownership. Telangana, they argue, failed to comply with these orders, neither constituting a state expert committee nor conducting geo-referencing as had been required, the former bureaucrats said.
The group said that had the Supreme Court’s directives been implemented in full, the Kancha Gachibowli area would likely have been designated as forest land based on its classification in land records as “wasteland”, a term often used to describe scrub forests or grasslands.
The group also cited a Supreme Court order from earlier this year that directed states to identify and geo-reference all forests. Telangana reportedly formed an expert committee on March 15, but the government went ahead with its development plans while awaiting the committee’s report or the court’s approval.
“This reflects a disregard for judicial authority,” the retired civil servants said.
The forested area in question, the group added, is ecologically rich and reportedly home to “migratory birds, 220 species of other birds, deer, 700 species of plants, the critically endangered star tortoises, and the Hyderabad Tree Trunk spider- an endemic species found nowhere else in the world”, the statement added.
The group welcomed the Supreme Court’s April 16 order in the matter and called for strict adherence to the directives.
The signatories to the statement include Punjab’s former director general of police Julio Ribeiro, Delhi’s former Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung and former Indian Administrative Service officer Harsh Mander.
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