Ahead of the visit of the Central team to the Posco site scheduled for August 27-28, the Jagatsinghpur district officials today held interactions with the villagers and village Forest Rights Act (FRA) committees to explain about the purpose of the visit of the team.
Sources said, the district administration has formed seven village level FRA committees at Dhinkia, Gobindpur, Nuagaon, Gadkujang, Polang, Noliasahi and Baynalkanda. The officials are believed to have persuaded the villagers not to claim their rights under FRA.
The objective of these FRA committees is to spread awareness on Forest Rights.
These committees held meetings at the village level to explain the purpose of the visit of the team of the Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF) led by former Union environment secretary Meena Gupta.
Apart from the villagers and the village FRA committees, the district administration also held talks with the members of the United Action Committee (UAC), a pro-Posco outfit active at the Posco site.
Sarojkant Chaudhury, additional district magistrate of Paradip; the Kujang tahsildar Basudev Pradhan and Murlidhar Swain, the block development officer of Ersama talked to the villagers as well as UAC members.
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Meanwhile, the Posco Pratirodh Sangram Samiti (PPSS), the organization spearheading the anti-Posco movement in the state and the Bhita Mati Surkhya Janmanch a newly formed pressure group at the Posco site also conducted their meetings to convince the visiting MoEF committee on their grievances.
The Central team will visit Dhinkia, Patana and Gobindpur village on Friday and remaining villages Nuagaon, Gadkujang Noliashai will be covered on Saturday.
The village FRA committees have convinced the affected villagers in Dhinkia and Gobindpur that the project affected people are not eligible for Forest Rights as there are no tribes in these villages.
Moreover, the committee members are of the view that as not a single villager has been residing in a forest area and hence they cannot consider as traditional forest dwellers.
Similarly, no tribe was living in these localities till 2005 and so these areas have no tribal habitants.
On the other hand, the FRA committee has also explained that no traditional forest dwellers have applied to the administration yet to get land documents and so not a single land document has been issued in favour of forest dwellers.