BDA & OSHB Directed To Resolve Forest Issues In Bhubaneswar Housing Areas

Bhubaneswar: The longstanding forest issues in housing areas of Bhubaneswar Development Authority (BDA) and Odisha State Housing Board (OSHB) were resolved at a high-level meeting here on Wednesday.

Chairing the meeting, Chief Secretary Suresh Chandra Mahapatra  took stock of the issued faced by people living in Baramunda, Paikanagar, Kanan Vihar and Jayadev Vihar areas from 1970s. After hearing he issues, Mahapatra directed BDA to complete the forest diversion proposals within a month.

The authorities concerned were also directed to undertake compensatory afforestation (CA) against the forest land to be diverted.

ADM Cuttack and DFO Athgarh were asked to demarcate the land for CA out of the land already identified by Revenue and Disaster Management (R & DM) department. Around 2000 households would be benefit from this intervention.

Stating that no forest land should be allotted for CA, the Chief Secretary directed the authorities to identify degraded revenue forests, and include those in land bank for CA so that no developmental project is hampered for forest diversion issues.

Additional Chief Secretary R&DM department, Satyabrata Sahu said the land bank for compensatory afforestation was already created. Around 26,500 acres of degraded revenue forest land were identified in 18 districts during January 2022. Districts like Keonjhar, Sundargarh, Balangir, Jajpur, Mayurbhanj, Balasore, Sambalpur, Angul, Cuttack, Dhenkanal, Ganjam, Jagatsinghpur, Jharsuguda, Malkangiri, Nabarangpur, Nuapada, Sonepur and Nayagarh contributed land to the land bank. Keonjhar district led the suit with the identification of around 10,800 acres in a month.

Sahu said the target was fixed to increase size of the land bank to 50,000 acres by March, 2022. He also fixed the ambitious target of bringing in about one lakh hectare of land to the fold of land bank for CA within a year.

It was decided in the meeting that Additional Chief Secretary R & DM would be the Nodal Officer for allotment of land for compensatory afforestation. The executing agencies of the developmental projects would approach the ADM (Revenue) of the concerned district for demarcation of land for CA out of the land bank.

Among others, Additional Chief Secretary Forest and Environment Dr Mona Sharma, Principal Secretary Housing and Urban Development G Mathivathanan, Principal Chief Conservator of Forests Sisir Kumar Ratho, Vice-Chairman BDA Sanjay Kumar Singh, Special Secretary R & DM Avaya Nayak, Secretary Odisha State Housing Board Sagarika Pattnaik along with senior officers attended the meeting.