The Goa Coastal Zone Management Authority (GCZMA) has received 3,493 suggestions and objections from North Goa and 4,016 from South Goa on the draft Coastal Zone Management Plan (CZMP). As the National Green Tribunal’s (NGT) deadline of August 31 for Goa to finalise its CZMP nears, the state has begun sending daily updates to the National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management (NCSCM), Chennai after verification of the inputs received from the public. Some of the main objections and suggestions received from the public over the draft CZMP are that either there is wrong or non-depiction of khazan lands, sluice gates, bunds, fishing zones, fish breeding zones, fishing wards, fishing village boundaries, sand dunes, mangroves and also heritage structures along Goa’s coast. Many have also claimed wrong depiction of the regulatory High Tide Line.
The GCZMA has drawn up an action plan and distributed the task of verifying the claims to different government departments. Inspections are also being carried out by expert members of the GCZMA. Accordingly, as the verified inputs are coming in, they are sent to the NCSCM to update the draft CZMP. The plan has been drawn to expedite the process of finalising the CZMP to meet the NGT deadline. While in the case of objections related to khazan lands, bunds and sluice gates the water resources department is carrying out the ground truthing, the objections and suggestions related to fishing zones, wards and fish breeding zones are being verified by the fisheries department. The inputs received about wrong depiction of high tide line and sand dunes are being looked into by a team of expert members of the GCZMA. The departments of archives and archaeology and town and country planning are verifying details related to wrong or non-depiction of heritage structures on the draft CZMP. Similarly, a team of experts, including Simon D’Souza, N P S Varde, Prabhkar Shirodkar and Vinod Dhargalkar are carrying out ground truthing of claims of wrong depiction of mangroves and mangrove buffer zones.
Goa and a few other states would have continued to drag their feet on readying the CZMP if not for a case filed before the National Green Tribunal in 2017 alleging that permissions were being issued without the plan being finalised. Taking cognisance, the NGT ordered the state governments concerned to prepare their individual plans and submit them to the Union environment ministry by August 31, 2019. It also directed that no further environment clearances be granted till the CZMPs were finalised. The deadline for Goa to finalise its CZMP today stands extended up to August 31 by the NGT.