The Tamil Nadu government on Tuesday informed the Madras High Court of having constituted two expert committees to come up with a consolidated list of elephant corridors, comprising both those that had already been identified as well as the potential ones, in the State.
A Division Bench of Justices N. Sathish Kumar and D. Bharatha Chakravarthy were informed of a government order issued on December 21 constituting the two committees with a request to complete the task within the next three months and submit their reports by the end of March 2023.
The submission was made after the court, at the last hearing of a case filed by activist S. Muralidharan, had concurred with amicus curiae M. Santhanaraman that there was a necessity to identify additional elephant corridors and directed the government to explain whether it would constitute a committee.
Accordingly, the government constituted two committees to identify the corridors in two landscapes — one to the north of Palghat Gap (comprising the Coimbatore, Nilgiris, Gudalur, Erode, Sathyamangalam, Hassanur, Hosur and Dharmapuri forest divisions) and the other to the south (comprising the Pollachi, Tiruppur, Dindigul, Kodaikanal, Theni, Megamalai, Srivilliputtur, Tirunelveli, Kalakkad, Ambasamudram and Kanniyakumari divisions).
After taking note of the government order, the judges asked a Special Government Pleader to ensure that the committees also considered the possibility of acquiring the land of those who had settled for long on the corridors to be identified by them so that those corridors could be restored for the movement of the pachyderms.