The Supreme Court of India has criticized former Uttarakhand minister Harak Singh Rawat and former forest officer Kishan Chand for allowing mass deforestation and illegal construction in the Corbett Tiger Reserve (CTR).
A top court bench led by Justice B R Gavai, with Justices PK Mishra and Sandeep Mehta, said that the connection between politicians and forest officials has caused a lot of harm to the environment for some political and business benefit.
Rawat, who was the forest minister in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in 2021, is now with the Congress party.
The court's decision came on a plea filed by environment activist and lawyer Gaurav Bansal, who said that the tiger habitat and the number of tigers in the Lansdowne Forest Division have gone down because of illegal construction in the Pakhro Tiger Safari and unlawful cutting of trees.
The Central Empowered Committee of the Supreme Court had earlier found Rawat and Chand guilty of various illegal activities, including building a tiger safari in 2021, in the Pakhro and Morghatti forest areas of the Kalagarh Forest Division of the Corbett Tiger Reserve.
In its report given to the top court, the committee said that Rawat and Chand did illegal construction activities in the Pakhro and Morghatti forest areas.
It had also allowed the Uttarakhand vigilance department to go on with the legal action against the forest officials who were part of the wrongdoings.
The committee had said that even when the media was telling about all the problems in Pakhro and Morghatti, the then-chief wildlife warden and the state government did not do anything against the wrongdoers.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is looking into the case now. The Supreme Court has asked the CBI to give a status report in three months.
"Since the matter is being investigated by the CBI, we do not want to say anything more about it. We have also seen that this cannot be done by two people only. Many other people must have been involved," the bench said.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has allowed the setting up of tiger safari in the outer and buffer areas of the protected forest Jim Corbett with some conditions.
