Though the government had decided to turn the jungle area into a conservation area in February 2012, the decision is limited to paperwork as the people residing in the forest area are opposed to the move, saying that they were not duly informed or involved in the process. [break]
A complication with Barandabhar jungle is that it is bisected by the East-West Highway, forming a buffer zone of the national park south of the highway, and a forest area, including community forestry and some patches of virgin forest land in the north.
The jungle area, north of the highway, includes 16 community forests that jointly cover 3,184 hectares of forest land, which the government had handed over to various community forest consumer groups in the past.
After deducting the forest area handed over to these user groups, 10,466 hectares of the jungle area still remains virgin. The government now wants to include this remaining jungle in its conservation plan.
The agitating user groups, backed by the local residents, who had been demanding the control over the entire jungle area for the last ten years, however, are still demanding five hundred hectares of the virgin jungle area to each of these 16 user groups.
Consequently, the government has not even been able to form a council to chalk out a work plan for the proposed conservation area.
"Though there is a legal provision that allows the district forest offer to hire a consultant to prepare the work plan, we demand that we should be allowed to form the council to prepare the plan," says Coordinator of the Barandabhar Struggling Committee, Pustak Prasad Gautam.
After the District Forest Office told the agitators that their demand can be fulfilled only through a policy-wise decision, they have decided to head to the capital to press for their demand.
The row basically stems from mistrust the local residents harbor about the government´s intention and their apprehension that their rights would be curbed once the forest area is conserved.
"Shivapuri (National Park) was first wrest from the locals in the pretext of converting it into a conserved forest, and then it was eventually turned into a national park," says Central Secretariat Member of the Federation of the Community Forests Users´ Nepal (FECOFUN), Thakur Prasad Bhandari. "The government´s motive remains ambiguous."
Bhandari adds that the government has already formed ten conserved forests and 20 more are in the pipeline.
"The government envisages a work plan for a conserved forest on the basis of the National Park and Wildlife Conservation Act rather than the Forest Act,"
he says. "Such a tendency harms the interests of the user groups."
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