NILGIRIS: A week after the Nilgiris forest department registered a case over the illegal levelling of road inside a reserve forest area near Kil Kotagiri and arrested three people, D Sivakumar, son-in-law of Tamil Nadu Minister K Ramachandran and owner of Medanad estate, has been named as the first accused in the case.
Meanwhile, the Kotagiri judicial magistrate court on Wednesday gave Sivakumar anticipatory bail in the case.
According to a chargesheet filed before the magistrate in the case registered under Section 21 of the Tamil Nadu Forest Act of 1882, estate manager Balamurugan, and Umar Farook and Pankaj Kumar Singh, drivers of an earthmover and a road roller, are the other accused in the case.
Though the owner has the right of pathway to his estate in Medanad, which is located in a patta land, he has carried out maintenance work in the reserve forest without getting prior permission from the forest department, sources said.
On April 13, forest department officials arrested the manager and the drivers and seized the vehicles used for levelling the road.
The state forest department came under severe criticism from environmentalists for registering a case only against the estate manager and the drivers. "During our second inquiry, we got statements from the other accused and registered a case against the estate owner,” an official said on Wednesday.
"Though it’s a non-cognizable offence, we produced Sivakumar before the magistrate for prosecution. We don’t want offenders to escape by paying a few lakhs through compounding of offence and we have initiated a judicial process considering the gravity of the offence. The estate owner, however, got anticipatory bail," a senior forest official said.
According to sources, of the four-km reserve forest area which is the right of pathway to the estate, the 2.4-km stretch is covered by a bitumen road laid by the forest department last year and the 1.6-km stretch is an earthen road. Sivakumar has allegedly carried out work on this stretch to level the road for smooth vehicle access to his estate without getting the forest department’s permission.
Speaking to reporters, Sivakumar said he owned the estate even before he became the son-in-law of the minister. “The minister has no links. The forest department has already granted the right of way to the estate. No new road was laid and only the existing potholed stretch was levelled by dumping mud,” he said.