The Central Empowered Committee (CEC) set up by the Supreme Court in the ongoing Kancha Gachibowli row at the University of Hyderabad (UoH) has come to the conclusion that the entire 2374 acres which the Telangana government wanted to take over for industrialisation prima facie “appears to have all characteristics of a forest.”
“Prima facie, based on its natural appearance and known ecological richness, the entire area measuring Ac. 2374-02 guntas, including the subject land in Kancha Gachibowli village—recorded as “Kancha Astabal Poramboke Sarkari” and assigned to the University—appears to have all characteristics of a forest. To verify this, the Central Empowered Committee (CEC) initially examined before-and-after photographs submitted by individuals and further analyzed biodiversity zones identified in the 2009 WWF University of Hyderabad study by overlaying them on a Google Earth map,” the CEC report explained.
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The CEC noted that the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh government had submitted recommendations in 1997 which the forest department had not acted upon and asked for a vegetation density survey by the Forest Survey of India (FSI). Following the as was a CEC’s request, the FSI commenced its work, and the Congress government in Telangana handed over Keyhole Markup Language (KML) files (file format used to display geographic data in earth browsers such as Google earth and Google maps) on April 10.
