Land locked
a Rs 550-crore Hero Honda plant in Nalagarh in Himachal Pradesh, proposed in June 2006, was considered the driver of industrial expansion in the state. The project was granted initial permission by the state at a single window clearance authority meeting and Rs 19,000 crore had already been mobilised for the task.
But disputes over classification of land soon brought the project to a halt.
Revenue or forest land? Himachal's land classification system has always been a problem area. Sixty-seven per cent of the total area is held by the forest department. The rest is mostly private land and a minuscule proportion, about 0.5 per cent, is revenue land. The dispute over land became intense between the forest and revenue departments after the Forest Conservation Act (fca), 1980, came into force.
The act says that any diversion of forestland requires the Centre's approval. "Obviously, the state is not very pleased. Despite being the owners of land, it is mandatory for the state to not only seek the Centre's permission for even small projects, but also pay the net present value (npv) for diverting forestland,' says R A Singh, principal chief conservator of forests, Himachal Pradesh.
The present crisis is the result of a number of notifications regarding land and settlement processes. The most important are the 1896, 1897 and 1952 central notifications under which large areas of government wasteland were declared protected forest, but without proper demarcations. The 1952 notification gave "all forest land or waste land in Himachal Pradesh which are the property of government' to the forest department for protection.
The state has, in the last decade, churned out numerous orders trying to denotify various kinds of land, making the classifications murkier. "It is difficult to say whether much of Himachal's area consists forest or revenue land. This is ridiculous as in any change of land use, we end up with a dispute,' says Sushil Kapta, deputy advisor, Himachal Pradesh Forest Sector Reforms Project.
Ambiguous policies Not surprisingly, the categorisation of the land earmarked for Hero Honda is ambiguous. Rajesh Kumar, deputy commissioner of Solan, says that according to revenue records, the 1,500 bighas with 50,000 trees
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