M F AHMAD
Daltonganj, June 3: Latehar district legal services authority (DLSA) has hit upon a novel outreach on the World Environment Day which falls on June 5.
According to sources, the DLSA team is planning to travel to an unvisited location where people live with their own concerns about life and the environment.
The secretary of Latehar DLSA Swati Vijay Upadhayay said a battery of judges and officials under the stewardship of the principal district and sessions judge Latehar civil court Akhil Kumar would hold the legal awareness camp on the protection of the environment, rights of the traditional forest dwellers, preservation of the biodiversity etc at Maromar under the South division of the tiger reserve Palamu on June 5.
“Our principal district and sessions judge Latehar Akhil Kumar directed us to move on to areas where we are to address the traditional forest dwellers,” said the Latehar DLSA secretary.
“We chose Maromar. It has around 9 villages and is a classic example of the traditional forest dwellers,” she added.
Swati Vijay Upadhayay further said that cases of contravening the forest acts come more from the traditional forest dwellers. It is more of their lack of awareness.
“We have a good number of cases of contravention of the forest acts in our courts and we on the World Environment Day will try to motivate traditional forest dwellers to refrain from involving or indulging in some such incidents that land them in a legal labyrinth,” Swati said.
According to Swati, there are forest offences which are non-compoundable and an offender has to face the music for it. She gave the example of man-made fire in the jungles all for collecting fruits of the Mahua trees.
She said such people for petty gains cause enormous harm to the wildlife, habitat, nature and biodiversity and remain all oblivious of what great wrong they have done. “We will tell them to stop causing damage to the jungles,” she said.
The DLSA secretary said some people let their cattle graze in the Palamu Tiger Reserve without knowing the consequences of it. Such people who take out their cattle in the jungles and leave their livestock on grasses and water meant for the wildlife, in fact, harm their own cattle vis a vis the environment and the wildlife.
“In the name of collecting minor forest produce people just try to ransack the forest,” added Swati Vijay Upadhayay.
Deputy director South division of PTR Mukesh Kumar said, “We will offer the battery of judicial officers all space for having their interactive session with the traditional forest dwellers at Maromar.”
Mukesh Kumar said every June 5, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) holds global environment day. It had taken its birth in the Stockholm Conference in the early seventies.
Sources said the Latehar DLSA outreach may be a small step but it is a positive note of making people aware of the global warming and no one other than Palamu can understand that this outgoing summer was too horrible when the mercury had shot up to 45 degrees Celsius.
