Gujarat’s top wildlife advisory board, led by Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel, will meet on March 5 in Gandhinagar to make a decision on a petition filed by an Ahmedabad-based reality firm seeking wildlife clearance for its mega resort near Gir National Park.
Gujarat’s State Board for Wildlife (SBWL) will also be discussing other issues.
The office of the principal chief conservator of forests (wildlife) and chief wildlife warden of Gujarat, has issued an agenda for the 21st meeting of the Board: confirmation of minutes of the 20th meeting, tabling of action taken report on decisions taken in the previous meeting, and discussion of proposal and appropriate recommendation on plea of Wildwoods Resorts and Realities Private Limited (WRRPL) of Ahmedabad in light of the recent court ruling.
The board is meeting for the second time in two months to discuss the resort that will be built on a 165-hectare plot of land near the Gir National Park and Wildlife Sanctuary in Gadhiya Chavand village, Dhari taluka, Amreli district.
At the Vibrant Gujarat Summit in 2009, the private firm and the state government signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU). The government had given the private firm some land, and the latter had purchased some parcels from private landowners.
However, due to wildlife clearances, the project was halted. SBWL had discussed the issue at its 20th meeting in December of last year, but had decided to keep it on the table for now.
The firm had applied for wildlife clearance but the Board had rejected it, stating the proposed project site falls within one-kilometre of the boundary of the Gir sanctuary, the world’s only habitat of Gir lions, and thus is in violation of the existing policy of the state government.
Subsequently, the private firm had moved the Gujarat High Court, contending its project site is 1.012 km away from the GS-15 coordinate, one of the 33 GPS coordinates along the boundary of Gir, as mentioned in maps of the 2016 draft notification of the eco-sensitive zone.
The Gujarat forest department, on the other hand, claims that the 33 GPS coordinates along the boundary do not provide a detailed delineation of Gir’s 626-kilometer-long boundary, pointing out that the distance between coordinates GS-14 and GS-15 is 14 kilometres.
It claimed that the boundary of Revenue Survey No. 43 of Gadhiya Chavand village, which was designated as part of the Gir sanctuary in 1974, is shared with the land purchased by the private firm for the proposed resort.
It has also argued in the High Court that the project land is only 400 metres and 540 metres away from point “A” and “B,” the two closest relevant reference points of the sanctuary boundary, respectively, and that the project site’s distance cannot be measured entirely from GS-15.
The High Court noted that if the distance is measured from the evidence provided, half of the project land will fall within the 1-km limit, and the project may fail as a result. “In such circumstances referred to above, we want the State Wildlife Board to look into the issue and accordingly guide the state government,” a bench of Justices J B Pardiwala and Vaibhavi Nanavati directed last November.