PANAJI: To remove anomalies and to finalise the coastal zone management plan (CZMP), 2019, the directorate of settlement and land records (DSLR) has begun a comparison of CZMP 2011 maps with state survey maps.
A senior official said that once the maps are prepared, they would be sent to the National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management (NCSCM), Chennai, to carry out corrections in CZMP 2011. Once the final plans are notified, work on CZMP 2019 will commence. The directorate will pinpoint the mangroves, sand dunes, etc, on the maps.
The discrepancies include village boundaries, survey plots, roads, khazan lands, and water bodies not being properly superimposed. The high tide line has also shifted towards land.
Meanwhile, the directorate, which had its plans digitised in its proprietary format, decided to convert the data into shapefiles. Having accomplished this task, an API (application programming interface) link was shared with the NCSCM on May 15, so that the high tide line and low tide line could properly be delineated on the state’s notified survey plans.
The CRZ notification 2011 provides for notifying maps in the scale of 1:25,000. These maps were notified in Nov 2022. “As these maps were not readable and since local-level CZMP maps are required to be prepared for use by local bodies and other agencies to facilitate implementation of CZMPs, we requested the NCSCM to generate these maps in the scale of 1:4,000,” chief minister Pramod Sawant had said.
The NCSCM then shared the maps in the scale of 1:4,000. These maps were scrutinised through directorate officials, and certain discrepancies came to light, which govt tried to sort out through the NCSCM. However, since the maps in the scale of 1:25,000 were already notified, the NCSCM said that since Union govt already approved the Goa CZMP on the 1:25,000 scale (including high-tide line, low-tide line, CRZ, khazans, etc), no change can be made to these areas without the approval of the Union environment ministry.
“If the superimposition is not done as per the notified survey plan of our state, which is hosted on the ‘BhuNaksha’ platform, it would lead to multiplicity of proceedings in various courts of law, and the traditional community will be at the receiving end,” Sawant had said.
Secondly, without rectifying CZMP 2011, the agency preparing CZMP 2019 will not be in a position to finalise it, as the errors would continue to crop up in the 2019 map.
“Further, various thematic layers are overlaid on the notified survey plans for the PM Gati Shakti portal, and one such layer would be that of CZMP 2011, which will display a distorted picture,” a senior official said.
