Supreme Court for policy to save sandalwood trees

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Supreme Court for policy to save sandalwood trees
Feb 27, 2012, 04.17AM IST

NAGPUR: The Supreme Court has directed states to immediately close down all unlicensed sandalwood oil factories still functioning and take effective measures for proper supervision of licensed ones. It has also asked the Centre to come out with a policy to save sandalwood trees.

The apex court judgment on February 13 in T N Godavarman Thirumulpad vs Union of India and others' was concerned with the question whether sandalwood, an endangered plant species, be declared as a 'specified plant' in Schedule VI of the Wildlife Protection Act (WPA), 1972.

Justices K S Radhakrishnan and C K Prasad were of the view that time had come to think of legislation similar to the Endangered Species Act enacted in the United States that protects both, endangered and threatened species.

The court has left the decision to include sandalwood in Schedule VI of the WPA to the National Board for Wildlife (NBWL) asking it to do so in six months. Conservationists have welcomed the order but demanded more stringent steps to curb the illegal felling of sandalwood trees.

"We feel the ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) needs to be very firm to save sandalwood trees," said Kishor Rithe, president of Satpuda Foundation. He expressed serious reservations over the MoEF's views stated in its affidavit filed before the SC on October 24, 2010.

The MoEF had stated, "the ministry has 'no objection' in allowing legal private entrepreneur to set up sandalwood oil units in non-sandalwood producing states provided that only legally sourced sandalwood is used and the regulatory enforcement mechanisms set up by the state are well in place."

Rithe said Maharashtra had already experienced adverse implications of this approach. There were 33 oil extraction units in the non-sandalwood growing state like Maharashtra prior to high court order on January 13, 2006.

He added these units in the state were found buying non-heart wood from the Karnataka forest department to show the stock on record which is unable to produce oil and later procured good sandalwood from illegal routes from Karnataka, Kerala and some parts of Maharashtra.

"So MoEF should learn from this and change its policy about non-sandalwood growing states," he stressed. "As NBWL member, I'll make my submission to the MoEF," said Rithe.

"The order shows that there was lack of inputs in terms of information from Maharashtra," said Nishikant Kale of Nature Conservation Society, Amravati (NCSA). The PIL against sandalwood oil extraction units running in the state was filed in the Nagpur bench of Bombay high court in 2005 by the NCSA.

Kale said the government even did not know the number of sandalwood oil extraction units running in the state. After the NCSA filed a PIL, government kept silent for two months. When the high court imposed a fine on the chief secretary and senior forest officers, it filed an affidavit stating that they had closed down all such units.

Kale also disapproved of the MoEF suggestion of imported sandalwood as a substitute for Indian sandalwood. "Imported sandalwood can never be viable. Traders will use smuggled sandalwood from India as departments have no mechanism to check illicit trade," felt Kale.

The SC has said that sandalwood was included in the Red List of International Union for Conservation and Nature (IUCN) as 'vulnerable' and hence serious attention by the Centre was needed considering the fact that all the sandalwood growing states had stated that it faced extinction.