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Journalism of Courage
SRINAGAR, SEPT 14: What was once a wetland for migratory birds is now an underground water storage tank. Where once there was dense undergrowth, there’s scorched earth. Bulldozers have ripped through the floor of the City Forests National Park, spread over 9.07 sq km, on the outskirts of Srinagar. More than 10,000 poplar, willow and walnut trees have been cut. The home of the Kashmir stag, hangul, musk deer, black bear, leopards and 70 species of birds, including the Paradise Flycatcher and the Ring Dove, is on its way to becoming an 18-hole golf course.
The Farooq Abdullah Government has set up the Sher-e-Kashmir International Conference Centre which has been asked to supervise the construction of the golf course at a cost of Rs 5.5 crore. More than half of the work is over, the fairways have been cleared, four tubewells and four pump stations are being set up, the official deadline is sometime next year.
In the process, rules have gone out of the window. “The construction of the golf course is illegalbecause a national park enjoys the highest status among the 521 protected areas in the country,” says Ashok Kumar of the Wildlife Protection Society of India. “For any change in its land use, the national park must be denotified through a resolution passed by the Assembly and, under the interim order of the Supreme Court, it has to be approved by the Indian Board for Wildlife.”
But nothing of this sort has been done. The state Wildlife Department has looked the other way. When contacted, Chief Wildlife Warden P C Kapur said he had no comment.
The park was notified in 1986 by then Governor Jagmohan after there was pressure to build houses, factories and hotels on the forest land. For visitors, a Zoo, huts and a 150-acre wetland for migratory ducks and geese was set up.
Within a year, however, it ran into trouble. The then Farooq Abdullah Government decided to convert it into a golf course but with the advent of militancy, the project was abandoned. Only to be revived in April this year when sevenbulldozers, a dozen tippers and 30 labourers moved in. Local foresters protested, there even was a clash, but work went on after a brief interruption.
No one from the Government is willing to explain how the project was cleared despite strict rules governing the use of national parks. Sher-e-Kashmir International Conference Centre chief Khurshid Naqib declines to comment on whether the park was denotified. All he is willing to say is that an international firm has been commissioned to design the course and that efforts were on to complete the course by next year.
As for Minister for Forests and Wildlife Choudhary Mohammad Ramzan, what is happening in the national park is “an anomaly and a continuation of the confusion that has dogged the park right from its inception.” But when asked about the golf course, he says: “The confusion will be sorted out and the legal formalities for the golf course completed soon.”
Environmentalists are angry. The park is rich in rare tree species like the Ulmus Villosaand the Parrotia, the main winter feed of the Hangul. Moreover, being in the Dal Lake’s catchment area, the park also forms a major bulwark against its rapid siltation.
