CHENNAI:Senior bureaucrat Atulya Misra, who has been appointed as inquiry officer to probe the Theni forest fire that has claimed 17 lives so far, will undertake a four-hour trek in Kurangani to probe the circumstances that led to one of India’s biggest tragedies inside a reserve forest.
Misra, currently serving as Principal Secretary for Revenue and Disaster Management, will be visiting Theni on Wednesday evening and will hold an officers’ meeting with the Collector, District Forest Officer and others. He will walk down the ill-fated path taken by the 36 trekkers on Thursday early morning.
“I am going with an open mind,” Misra told Express on the eve of his visit . The IAS officer has already commenced the investigation and met several trekking clubs to know how the expeditions are organised.
He will be looking into circumstances leading to the tragic incident, procedure established in the Forest department for regulation/permission of trekking in reserved forest area, role and lapses if any on the part of trekking organisers, forest officials and the official will be giving out recommendations to avoid such incidents in forest areas in future after the completion of the inquiry.
“Besides finding out what exactly went wrong on March 11, the source of forest fire and whether the trekkers had deviated from designated route and trespassed into restricted reserve forest, the other focus would be on evolving a mechanism to prevent such tragedies from happening in future. The State government is exploring the possibility of introducing an online system to streamline the trekking activity. In interactions with the trekking associations, what I see is some are registered, a few are registered as NGOs and others don’t have any recognition. From the Forest department’s point of view, they treat everyone as individuals, collect `200 per head and allow them to trek in designated route,” he said.
When this correspondent brought to his notice that the Tamil Nadu Forest department has been dragging its feet on providing the officers’ numbers to the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), which would provide instantaneous forest fire alerts via SMS, Misra said the matter was being looked into and shortly about 5,000 phone numbers would be registered with NRSC.
A day after the March 11 tragedy, Express had reported that satellite data processed by NRSC between March 6 and 11 showed that 32 active forest fires were detected near Bodi Hills, Ahamalai, Kurangani and Kottagudi, all in the same expanse of the western ghats where the tragedy happened. The NRSC has been monitoring active forest fires as part of the Disaster Management Support Programme of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). YVN Krishnamurthy, director, NRSC, told Express that the forest fire alert in Kurangani Hills was sent to the Forest Survey of India (FSI) by 2 pm on March 11.The FSI says the alert was sent to the Tamil Nadu Forest Department, which later claims is untrue. Misra has two months to submit the report.