The Congress on Tuesday applauded the Supreme Court’s interim order asking the States and Union Territories to act as per the definition of a “forest” laid down by the top court in a 1996 judgement, and said that it was committed to protecting forests and environment when an INDIA bloc government is formed at the Centre.
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Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh accused the Narendra Modi-led government of tweaking the laws to make it easier to hand over India’s forests and pollute the environment, to benefit Mr. Modi’s “corporate crony friends.”
“So first, he changed the rules in 2017 so that projects that had violated their forest clearance could be legalised. Over 100 projects of big corporates including coal mines, factories and cement plants were allowed to brazenly start work in violation of environmental clearances,” Mr. Ramesh alleged in a long post on X. The SC ruling, that comes soon after a judgment against the “electoral bonds scam”, stopped another set of “blatantly illegal and disastrous” Modi government schemes, he said.
‘Stripped forest protection’
The Forest Conservation (Amendment) Act of 2023, the Congress leader said, stripped protection from two lakh square kilometres of forests. “This was in complete violation of a 1996 Supreme Court judgment. This amendment would have made it easy to divert ‘deemed forests’, as well as forests in the North East,” he claimed.
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Mr. Ramesh, a former Union Minister of Environment and Forests, was one of the six Opposition members to file a dissent note against a Parliamentary Committee report on the Forest (Conservation) Amendment Bill, which had changed the definition of a “forest”.
“One by one, the scams and frauds of the Modi government are being exposed in India’s highest court of law,” he alleged. “The Congress applauds this order, and commits to protecting India’s forests and environment when we form an INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance) government,” he added.
