Tanvi Sinha
A bench of the Supreme Court of India headed by Chief Justice of India Justice SA Bobde on 4th January 2021 adjourned the PIL that sought directions on the control of the Uttarakhand fires to next week.
This move has been pushed by a PIL brought about by Garhwali (Uttarakhand) native lawyer Rituparn Uniyal to the top court. The lawyer mentioned more than 1400 incidents of forest fires reported in 2019 alone and spoke of 1,600 hectares of forest covers affected by these fires.
The main objective the lawyer hopes to accomplish is to have the Supreme Court state that all living creatures, avian and aquatic and otherwise, in the region be considered legal entities and additionally wants a probe on the timber mafia that terrorize the ecosystem of the state.
This is not the first time a decision of this sort has been taken in an Indian court. In 2018, the Uttarakhand High Court itself promised for the living creatures in the state, aquatic avian or otherwise to be considered living creatures with all the rights they deserve, intact.
This is not a new issue for the state and remains an annual tragedy that the ecosystem has to deal with. 45.43% of the state is covered by forests and is a leading exporter of Apples and other tree and forest-based products.
The Uttarakhand fires have hence become an extremely important issue for the government as well. 2016 saw the worst of the Uttarakhand fires with more than 4,500 acres of land destroyed because of a heatwave and seven people dead.
In 2020 alone, there were said to be almost nine hectares of jungles that had burnt down in just 20 days following which the government started procedures of controlled burning in Uttarkashi to survey forest fires.
The peak in such fires generally occurs in May and June, which is why the presence of these fires with the soon-coming of the Winter was extremely worrying. To this, the Divisional Forest Officer of Uttarkashi forest division had spoken up saying that the reason for these fires would have to be the dryness of the forests owing to a lack of rainfalls.
The matter was taken seriously, and the government had invoked the help of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police to control the fires.
These untimely fires seem to not indicate stopping, with 245 hectares being burnt from October 1st to December 1st.
2020 forest fires were declared the second-worst in all the years of the formation of the forests, only behind the 2016 catastrophe with 2,000 acres of land affected.
The petitioner mentioned how the Supreme Court had itself extended the definition of Article 21 to meet the dignity of animals as well in the Animal Welfare Board of India vs. A. Nagaraja & others, and has moved the court to send directions based on the same for the region as well.
